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The Soho Leopard by Ruth Padel.
Chatto & Windus. 79pp; £8.99.

The Information Poem. Probably birthed by Good Midwife Google. We may even – by way of aside – be close to the poem written by Google. But let’s hear the shape of such a poem:

Water, moonlight, danger, dream.
     Bronze urn, angled on a tree-root: one
     Slash of light, then gone. A red moon
Seen through clouds, or almost seen.

                   …. an old song
     Remembered, long debt paid.
     A painting on silk, which may fade.

Note the numerous pauses in these lines. A studied musicality.

   The title poem to the collection, ‘The Snow Leopard’, is in 35 stanzas. It begins as a walking meditation through London’s Soho district – famed for its variety of human interest, especially its vices – a meditation on dwelling on the ended affair which, I take it, was the
central theme of Padel’s earlier book, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You. An ended affair which, nevertheless, continues to surface even in a late poem called ‘The Wishing Stone’, which I will quote in full:

Everyone lives by stories. These were ours.
The lies

We twist like dough, watch rise,
And feed ourselves.

To make a past and future we can bear,
Are also story-shaped. Stories

Are what we face the mirror with.
This was the last we shared.

Abruptly in the seventh stanza of ‘The Soho Leopard’, the leopard persona shifts from first to third person with the words “Let’s take this out of self and call my leopard ‘her’ – ”. The central and best achievement of the book is this poem – it smells least of the scholar’s lamp. As someone who, in his own work, has often pondered the problems raised by the conscious wish to deploy book-learning and personal experience in conjunction with poetry-effective feeling, I admire Ruth Padel’s success in this poem.

   A second remarkable sequence – written to commission – is called ‘King’s Cross Foxes’. Here the style of writing is, if anything, tauter still:

High-risk time. Cubs are adults now – and
if they can, grab the kingdom of weakening
parents, ranges of foxes that died. Fighting begins.

                               ….  Come spring,
a third of the lot will survive,
weathering deep freeze of winter
 
                                  … As a captive
he might get nine years.
On the streets, one or two; never three.

– so that one feels the perpetual tension of a fox’s life. Where Ken Smith in ‘Fox Running’ emphasised the motion in a fox’s life, Ruth Padel evokes the fear, the insecurity … the tension of its being. Again, too, the sense comes across of precise information about her subject – and she admits in the book’s ‘acknowledgments’ having run the sequence past a vulpine expert before releasing it.

   This is a fascinating collection: both for the scientifically-minded reader, and for the general reader. Padel is a zoological poet, a modern Erasmus Darwin. But sometimes – and this is the risk of all information poems – she sounds as if she is repeating a page from a zoological textbook.

   In another poem of the active fancy, alligators – for reasons not entirely clear – deliver a peroration on human wounds. Actually, it’s very medical and precise – again text-book like. But Padel’s tightlipped, verbal strength, her poetic economy, is delightful. The wounds are “Plug holes with granulation, covered by / Black burgundy. The scab. How you heal.”

   As I say, are we close to the poem written by Google? Or is it
simply that more and more scientific material is being incorporated in
contemporary poetry? Whatever, this is a fascinating book.