Showing results by author "Ruth Padel" in Poetry

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does native mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? In 90 richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel's original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature, and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.

'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts.

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does native mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? In a selection of richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes from her collection The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature, and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. 'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds, and beasts.

Ruth Padel's new sequence of poems, in four movements, is a personal voyage through the life and legend of one of the world's greatest composers. She uncovers the man behind the music, charting his private thoughts and feelings through letters, diaries, sketchbooks, and the conversation books he used as his hearing declined. She gives us Beethoven as a battered four-year-old, weeping at the clavier; the young virtuoso pianist agonized by his encroaching deafness; the passionate, heartbroken lover. Padel's quest takes her into the heart of Europe and back to her own musical childhood.