Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Ruth Padel. Tigers in Red Weather.
Abacus, £8.99/$19.00, Pages 430, ISBN 0-349-11698-9.

Ruth Padel. The Poem and the Journey And Sixty Poems to Read along theWay.
Chatto & Windus/Random House, £12.99, Pages 364,
ISBN 978-0-701-17973-1.

Ruth Padel. 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: A Poem for every Week of the Year,
Vintage/Chatto & Windus/Random House, £8.99, Pages 272, ISBN 0-099-42915-2.

   Ruth Padel is one of the most remarkable writers in contemporary Britain, certainly among the most intelligent. As a poet she has displayed her fine style with rhythm, control and syntax in her numerous books, and now she displays that same skill in her prose writing as well.

   Both The Poem and the Journey And Sixty Poems to Read along the Way and 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: A Poem for every Week of the Year, are remarkable journeys through the intricate world of poetics — enjambment, rhyme scheme, form, metaphor, style, alliteration, allusion, and much much more. But what is unique about these two books is the way she engages the reader — not talking down from the pulpit but treating the reader as a friend, as part of one congregation. Padel takes up a poem by a poet, and then uses it as a base for providing criticism not just on the poem or the poet, but much more beyond that through specificity, allusiveness, suggestion, and comment.

   Tigers in Red Weather grapples with a real crisis of our times — that of disappearing tigers worldwide, that of extinction, erosion of values, lack of sympathy for our natural reserves, but ultimately the book is a comment on the way we approach humanity. Here is a poet writing in full flight at the height of her powers: “I stood on a slope of ash. Black-flecked grey tweed everywhere, up to the wolf-grey horizon. No shadows, nothing tall enough to throw one, just coal-black stumps broken when blazing trunks crashed into flame. Across them a few long white shafts, fallen when fire had passed. (from the chapter ‘The Burning’ on page 281).

   Ruth Padel’s poetry, prose and criticism are presented in a way that is not obscure, but intelligently accessible and always beautifully crafted. Here is a writer that both the specialist and the general reader can relate to at the same time — each taking from her work different levels and sorts of pleasures. It is her ability to wear her immense scholarship lightly without compromising her work that ultimately attracts me to Ruth Padel’s highly evolved writing style.