PADEL, Ruth

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Nationality: Irish. Born: London, 8 May 1946. Education: Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, B.A. (honors) 1969; Wolfson College, Oxford, M.A., D.Phil. 1976. Family: Married Myles Burnyeat in 1984; one daughter. Career: Research fellow and lecturer, Oxford University, 1972–80; lecturer in classics, Birkbeck College, University of London, 1980–84. Since 1984 freelance writer and lecturer. Awards: National Poetry Competition winner, 1996. Address: 50 Thurlow Road, London NW3 5PJ, England.

Publications

Poetry

Alibi. London, Many Press, 1985.

Summer Snow. London, Century Hutchinson, 1990.

Angel. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1995.

Fusewire. London, Chatto and Windus, 1996.

Rembrandt Would Have Loved You. London, Chatto and Windus, 1998.

Other

In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1992.

Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1995.

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Critical Studies: By Barbara Goff, in Classical Philology, 89(2), April 1994; by Jasper Griffin, in The Spectator (London), 274(8704), 6 May 1995; by Marianne McDonald, in Theater, 26(3), 1995.

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Ruth Padel's poetry explores the extremes of human emotion. Drawing their subjects from a wide range of narrative situations and their language from multiple lexicons, her poems are at ease inhabiting a mental ward, fine arts museums, or the myriad abodes of lovers. But mostly Padel's poems inhabit minds: the mind of a prostitute on her way to pick up a trick, of a GI, of a mental patient, of her doctor, and, in Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, of a lover. In a talk called "Public Poets, Public Poems, Public Art" at the British Library, Padel began, "I want to start with what poetry does anyway when you write it—it makes public something that is private, it comes from your private mind." Indeed, this seems to be her own project, and she embraces the lyric poem as the form in which several "private minds" become audible and converse.

Angel, Padel's 1995 book, seems to be a poetic version of her diagnosis. That is, the poet renders the private minds of her characters in order to classify, comprehend, and account for them. We see here the relationship between Padel's poetry and her critical work, which traces the meaning of madness in Greek mythology. Of course, Padel does not simply replicate the diagnostic process; she questions it, turns it on its head by speaking through the subject, and essentially investigates investigation. The title poem, in the voice of an alien, offers scientific diction—the language of classification and investigation—alongside the plainest of plain speech. The "angel" describes himself as "a nest of rays, all protein, / grey velvet triangles / six metres wing to wing" and imagines his own dissection: "Suppose they clawed / one ring from my antenna-bone / up through that tunnel of sea-cow / and acetta swabs." But, he concludes, "they" still would not know him. The proof of this—and the poem's real brilliance—lies in the final gesture toward colloquialism, when the angel-alien addresses us directly: "Baby," he says, "where I come from, / we had pre-rusted pictoscopes to tell us about aliens like you."

These sorts of linguistic juxtapositions drive Padel's poems. In "The Starling" the speaker describes a bird who "looked, then, a bedraggled poisonous orchid," setting the narrative of Bedlem [sic] inmates against the lyricism of the natural world. In the final section of the book a Bedlem doctor's voice becomes remarkably imagistic and nonclinical in "Peach Tree," wondering, "How can I leave / a free-standing peach tree, / my greenfrosted waste-mould / salad of broken-glass light?" In these lines we seem to hear the voice of the poet, who, though drawn to the abstract, cannot leave the image behind.

How lucky for her readers that Rembrandt Would Have Loved You maintains Padel's commitment to numerous ways of storytelling. In a series of love poems Padel establishes the vulnerability and strength of her speaker. Obsessive love, the center of the book, is at once conventionally titillating ("the breeze / On your nipples"), contemporary ("lightning … / Imagining itself Aretha Franklin"), and warm ("the warmest small patisserie in the world"). While Angel is primarily voice driven, the raw imagery of the book becomes more finely wrought here, lending to Rembrandt 's single voice a tremendous consistency. Mythological and cultural allusions abound, from Echo and "the Mahabarata Bride" to the Spice Girls, but they never seem to exclude the reader from the poems.

Because of Padel's ability to traverse the earth verbally, her poems speak to concerns larger than the single mind or the single love affair. The fractures and longings of her characters' spirits are global, and in this sense Padel is a truly contemporary poet.

—Sonya B. Posmentier