Ruth Padel

Biography

Padel is daughter of psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda Barlow, daughter of Sir Alan Barlow and Nora Barlow née Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, through whom Padel is Darwin's great-great-grandchild. Her brother is historian Oliver Padel; cousins include prison reformer Una Padel, sculptor Phyllida Barlow, mathematician Martin T. Barlow and biographer Randal Keynes; her uncle is Horace Barlow. Padel was born in Wimpole Street where her great-grandfather Sir Thomas Barlow practised medicine. She attended North London Collegiate School, studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford where she sang in Schola Cantorum of Oxford, wrote a PhD on Greek poetry, and as the first Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College Oxford, which altered its Statutes for her to accommodate female Fellows,
was among the first women to become Fellows of formerly all-male Oxford colleges. She taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, has lived extensively in Greece, and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, Paris. Her publishing career began in 1985, while she was teaching Greek at Birkbeck College, with a poetry pamphlet. She then left academe to support herself by reviewing and publish her first collection (1990). From 1984 to 2000 she was married to philosopher Myles Burnyeat. In 2013, she rejoined academic life, and is Professor of Poetry at King's College London.

Poetry

Padel has published eleven collections, won the UK National Poetry Competition, and is said to be an exquisite image-maker of intense lyricism, delicate skill, rich imagery, deep resonance and a wild generous imagination. Her range includes the personal - her love poems caused her to be described as "the sexiest voice in British poetry", her elegiac poems explore loss and bereavement, - but also music, science, nature, painting, history, and socially engaged themes of homelessness, immigration, the Middle East, and wildlife conservation. Stylistic hallmarks are said to be juxtaposition of the modern world with the ancient, technical skill and musicality; wit, passion, lyrical intelligence, internal and half-rhyme, enjambement and unusual energy within and against the line, 'As if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in." Quoted influences include Gerard Manley Hopkins and Greek choral lyric. From 1998 to 2004, Padel's collections reflect themes of simultaneously written non-fiction: music (I’m a Man - Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll); technical attention to the poetic line (52 Ways of Looking At A Poem, exemplified in poems such as 'Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfrieshire' her National Poetry Competition winner); and wildlife (Tigers in Red Weather). Two later collections, Darwin - A Life in Poems and The Mara Crossing, include prose; Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth(2014), with its resonant last line, 'Making is our defence against the dark,' has been called a meditation on conflict and history: especially of the Abrahamic religions. Tidings - A Christmas Journey addressed homelessness in her local London borough. Emerald (2018), a memoir and meditation on the poet's mother at her death, explored the alchemy of mourning and the renewing value of green.

Migration, Middle East, homelessness

Padel's collaboration with Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj, on Syrian refugees arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos, was performed on the first day of the Venice Biennale 2019. Tidings - A Christmas Journey (2016) dedicated to the Focus Homeless Outreach Team in Camden, North London, is described as an eloquent unsentimental narrative poem exploring homelessness and the meanings of Christmas today."The rough, apparently unmanageable contrast between child and tramp, hope and despair, gives the book its integrity. Padel's 2014 collection Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth collects poems going back twelve years reflecting keen interest in the Middle East, from her prize-winning poem on Pieter Bruegel’s "The Triumph of Death", the 2002 Siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, to the title poem "Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth", which she has stated came from hearing Le Trio Joubran. She has held dialogues with Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, and written an Introduction to the posthumous poems of Mahmoud Darwish. Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth is said to have a 'magnificent central section on the Crucifixion,' and be steeped in the Middle East, Judaism, Christianity and Islam: "Padel is a poetic Daniel Barenboim, determined to arrive at some approximation of Middle Eastern harmony." Her innovative poems-and-prose volume The Mara Crossing (2012) revivified the prosimetrum, a medieval mix of poetry and prose, It addresses animal and human migration. and is described as a sweeping, experimental volume. Migrants, cellular, animal or human, migrate to survive; human migration is inextricable from trade, invasion, colonization and empire. "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?" Padel supported the "Making It Home" project of the Refugee Survival Trust in Glasgow, which used poetry-based film-making to build bridges between groups of women of refugees and local women in Edinburgh.

Darwin and science

Engaged in relating poetry and science, Padel has written on cell migration for The Scientist, was a judge for the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Book Prize and the 2005 Aventis Science Prize for the Royal Society has written poems on genetics and zoology, and her book on migration is said to connect micro-level cell migration with macro-level social migration. An interest in combining poetry, science and religion is reflected in poems on genetics, debates on poetry and prayer with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons and a residency at the Environment Institute, University College London.
Her poems on Charles Darwin (2009) employ Darwin's writings, letters and journals in an unusual form of biography, addressing his life, family and science. They were received as innovative work by scientists and by the literary community as a "new species" of biography in verse,  whose emotional centre is the Darwins' marriage, shaken by divergent religious belief and the death of a daughter. The book's staging by the Mephisto Stage Company, Ireland, was described as intensifying the musicality of the verse and dramatic interplay between the scientific and the spiritual that permeates this collection. Since Padel is a Darwin descendant, the book was also a family memoir. Her preface illuminates the role of Padel’s grandmother, Nora Barlow, who in editing Darwin's Autobiography restored a passage in which Darwin said he did not see how anyone could wish the doctrine of hell to be true; this had been deleted by the first editor, Darwin's son Francis, at his mother's request. Padel's poems connected Darwin's loss of his mother as a child with his passion for collecting; and linked his early scientific writing with his taxidermy teacher in Edinburgh John Edmonstone, a freed slave from Guiana.

Music

Since 2013, Padel has written and performed sequences of poems on composers in conjunction with the Endellion String Quartet: first on Josef Haydn's Seven Last Words, which formed the central crucifixion section in her 2014 collection Learning to make an Oud in Nazareth; subsequently on Beethoven's late quartets and Schubert's Death and the Maiden. She was first Writer in Residence at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and is said to be a lifelong choral singer; she has presented Radio 3's programme "The Choir", has broadcast a series of BBC Radio 3 opera interval talks and has stated that if she could choose any other career it would be that of opera director. She has written on women's voices in opera and on a sixteenth-century madrigal for the London Review of Books, and in a Radio 3 essay series, Writers as Musicians, she spoke about playing viola,
an instrument whose "inner voice" illustrates her Newcastle Poetry Lectures Silent Letters of the Alphabet. For BBC Radio 4 she has written and presented features on writers, scientists and composers including Hans Christian Andersen, Edward Elgar, Charles Darwin and W.S. Gilbert. On Desert Island Discs, her choices included Beethoven String Quartet Opus 132, Verdi's Requiem, "Down by the Salley Gardens" sung by Kathleen Ferrier, "I’m Ready for You" sung by Muddy Waters, a Cretan folksong and "The Boys from Piraeus", from the film Never on Sunday. Her luxury was a herd of deer.

Love, journeying, bereavement, creativity

Padel's 1996 to 2004 collections, Fusewire, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, mixed passionate love lyric with wide adventuring across the globe,  but also challenged the supremacy of the male chad97@example.org. Rembrandt Would Have Loved You offered the female gaze: "The poems tangle with  the shadowy undergrowth of political correctness, feminism and sex." Emerald, 2018, a meditation on the consoling nature of green, "guides us around the world,  intense flights of geological and geographical fancy anchored to the bedrock of real emotion"; "a wild and generous imagination, a writer at the peak of her powers, a rich excavation of the truths and mysteries found in grief", but also an exploration of the relation between loss and creativity.

Greek scholarship, Greek myth, rock 'n' roll

Padel's non-fiction began with Princeton University Press studies of ancient Greek drama and the mind.In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self explores the way Greek ideas of inwardness shaped European notions of the self. She used anthropology and psychoanalysis to support her thesis that male Greek culture spoke of the mind as mainly "female" and receptive rather than "male" and active. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Madness in Greek and Other Tragedy investigates madness in tragedy from the Greeks to Shakespeare and the moderns, parsing different views of madness in different societies. She presented the tragic hero as embodiment of the human mind, 'which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures.'
Her 2000 study I'm A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll argued that rock music began as a "wishing well of masculinity", which drew on mythic connections between male sexuality, aggression, anxiety, misogyny and violence which derived from Ancient Greece. Padel has stated that she intended this to focus on women's voices but then felt she ought first to pick apart the maleness of rock music. The book had a mixed reception from male reviewers. Women reviewers described it as original, beautifully expressed, vivid, amusing and convincing; Rock writers Charles Shaar Murray and Casper Llewellyn Smith described it as "provocative and fascinating" and her analysis of rock's misogyny "dazzling".

Wildlife and conservation

Padel is known for her poetry and prose on conservation, especially of tigers, served as Trustee for Zoological Society of London, inaugurated an influential programme of ZSL Writers' Talks on Endangered Species to highlight the Zoological Society of London's conservation work. and is an Ambassador for New Networks for Nature, an alliance of practitioners in different fields, artistic and scientific, who celebrate Britain's nature and wildlife.
Her account of wild tiger conservation, drawing on her scientific background and Darwinian descent, was valued internationally for quality of nature writing, insights on conservation, travel writing on little-known parts of the world such as Sumatra, Bhutan and Ussuriland, her ear for dialogue. and portrait of both the tiger and the field-zoologist.

Fiction

Padel's novel Where the Serpent Lives(2010), focussing on wildlife crime in India and the UK, was noted for vivid nature writing, innovative use of science and an animal's eye viewpoint. In India and UK, reviewers commented on the imaginative connections between nature, poetry and science. "She has done for the forests of Karnataka and Bengal what Amitav Ghosh did for the Sundarbans in The Hungry Tide."

Criticism, teaching

Padel is Professor of Poetry at King's College London. From 1998 to 2001 she pioneered The Sunday Poem, a weekly column in London's Independent on Sunday in readings of contemporary poems she collected in her popular books 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. As Chair of the UK Poetry Society 2004-2007, she presided over the establishment of poetry 'Stanzas' across the UK. In 2010 she chaired Judges for the Forward Poetry Prize, in 2011 delivered the Housman Lecture at the Hay Festival on "The Name and Nature of Poetry," and inaugurated Radio 4's Poetry Workshop, a series of programmes on writing poetry in which she led workshops with poetry groups across the UK.
Her books on reading poetry and the column from which they grew influenced a decade of writing about poetry in the UK, followed by her Newcastle University 'Bloodaxe' Lectures on poetry's use of silence, Silent Letters of the Alphabet. Her criticism is reported to employ close analysis, knowledge of Greek poetics, myth, metaphor, tone and rhyme; she is said to read with aural acuity, generosity and no polemic; her precision "does not obscure but builds the big picture", addressing the general reader but with "utmost attention to the page".
She has written introductions to the works of Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti and Ramsey Nasr, and British poets Walter Ralegh, Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
At the opening festival of the T S Eliot Festival at Little Gidding in 2006, 70 years after Eliot's visit there, Padel described the contrast between Eliot's memories of Little Gidding and his experience of The Blitz whilst writing the poem. "It reminded him there was still a place that had a sense of truth." She returned to this moment in her Foreword to the posthumous volume of Mahmoud Darwish, comparing his sense of the poet's role in a time of violence to that of Seamus Heaney in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and of Eliot during the London blitz.

Oxford Professor of Poetry

In 2009, with 297 votes, Padel became the first woman to be elected Oxford Professor of Poetry.(Predecessors James Fenton and Christopher Ricks were elected on 228 and 214 votes; online voting now allows wider participation.) She was elected in a media storm, triggered by photocopied pages from a university publication describing sexual harassment charges against her rival Derek Walcott, who withdrew his candidacy. Padel denied connection with them, but commentators alleged her involvement and she resigned, saying she did not wish to do the job under suspicion. Public comment attributed treatment of Padel to a gender war, or misogyny, or 'toxicity of the media', which both 'pursued allegations against Walcott's past and criticised Padel for having mentioned them as a source of voters' disquiet,'; unfairly excavating Walcott's past while unfairly  denigrating Padel, "justly held in high regard for her poetry and teaching." Oxford had "missed out for the worst of reasons on an inspirational teacher; Walcott removed the decision from the electorate by his own choice; Padel should not have been made to pay for his decision to confront neither his accusers nor his past." On Newsnight Review, poet Simon Armitage, elected to the Chair in 2016,  expressed regret at her resignation. "Ruth's a good person. I don't think she should have resigned, she would have been good."