About this item
“Life began with migration.” In a magnificent tapestry of life on the move, Ruth Padel weaves poems and prose, science and religion, wild nature and human history, to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins. “Migration builds civilization but also causes displacement.” From the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt, the Lost Colony on Roanoke and the famous photograph ‘Migrant Mother’, she turns to John James Audubon’s journey from Haiti and France, heirlooms carried through Ellis Island, Kennedy’s “society of immigrants” and Casa del Migrante on the Mexican border.But she reaches the human story through the millennia-old journeys of cells in our bodies, trees in the Ice Age, Monarch butterflies travelling from Alaska to Mexico.
About the Author
Ruth is an award-winning UK poet, Professor of Poetry at King's College London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, author of 11 poetry collections and 10 prose books of fiction and non-fiction. Her new collection Emerald is a daughter's chronicle of loss, a searching and heartfelt meditation on her 97 year old mother's life. A collection on bereavement which paradoxically sparkles with colour: sunset-pinks of the Emerald City, Jaipur, pitch-black emerald mines, and the jewel itself, which stands for hope and renewal. Plumbing the earth, and the bedrock of the heart, Emerald returns us to the light with renewed joy in the living world of nature. 'Ruth Padel is one our national treasures; Emerald is one of her greatest achievements to date' (André Naffis-Sahely, Ambit, http://ambitmagazine.co.uk/reviews/on-ruth-padels-emerald-chatto-windus-2018) . You can read poems from it in the White Review http://www.thewhitereview.org/poetry/two-poems-10/ and Kenyon Review, https://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2018-janfeb/selections/ruth-padel-763879/Ruth teaches Creative Writing at King's College London. She is one of the many great great grand-children of Charles Darwin: her verse biography of him, "Darwin - A Life in Poems", is published by Knopf. Her firsthand account of tiger conservation, "Tigers in Red Weather" was shortlisted for the US Kiriyama prize. "Occasionally you open a new book, read a few pages and just know: This is special." (Michael Dirda, Washington Post) She lives in London, loves singing and dogs - though she hasn't the time to look after one at the moment; is a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and a Trustee of the conservation charity New Networks for Nature, http://www.newnetworksfornature.org.uk/about_us.htm, an alliance of scientists and artists who aim to challenge the low priority placed nationally and politically on the natural world. See www.ruthpadel.com and follow Ruth on Twitter @ruthpadel.
