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| A fascinating, very rich book. It excitingly combines several large tasks and shows that Darwin's science sprang from the same aesthetic impulse as poetry. With sympathy and grace, Padel moves deftly between between science, love and family; between the vast processes of evolution and a personal life.
Sean O'Brien
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Charles Darwin lost his mother at the age of eight, repressed all memory of her, and poured his passion into newt collecting and shooting. As a young man, his five year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle changed his life. Afterwards, working privately on groundbreaking theories about the development of species, he published his geological findings. He also made a nervous proposal to his cousin Emma.
They had a very happy marriage but both were painfully aware of the gulf between her devout Christian faith and his increasing religious doubt. The death of three of their ten children accentuated this gulf. For Darwin, death and extinction were nature’s way of developing new species: the survival of the fittest. For Emma, death was a prelude to the afterlife.
In these extraordinary poems, using multiple viewpoints – even, at one point, the orangutang at London Zoo – Ruth Padel follows the development of Darwin’s thought, the drama of the discovery of evolution, and fluctuating emotions in Darwin the husband, the naturalist and the tender father, in a powerful tribute to her famous forbear.
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| A very bold book, probably unique: a life in verse, even painting parallel lives that influenced Darwin’s like that of Alfred Russel Wallace. We all have our own Darwin, but poetry gets under the skin of the subject in a way conventional biography cannot match.
Richard Fortey
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| Ruth Padel’s control of cadence and poetic diction is daring and exciting; her rhythm brilliant and subtle; the play with stanza form and technical tricks stunning and deeply impressive. Her handling of details and quotations from Darwin’s life, letters and books is a lesson to biographers and poets alike.
Colm Toibin
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| Ruth Padel’s remarkable memoir of her great-great-grandfather is a sequence of exquisite, precise and moving poems that cover his science, travels, marriage and family life. Once I started reading I could not put it down until I had reached the end, and then I turned back for the pleasure of reading again.
Claire Tomalin
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Information
Chatto & Windus • Poetry & poets • Previous
ISBN: 0701183853
Publication date: 12/02/2009 • 160 pages • 208 x 135 • EAN: 9780701183851 |
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