Published by Chatto & Windus, part of Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
£8.99
Author:
Ruth Padel
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9780701176211
£8.99
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9780701176211
Published: 10 Jun 2004
Beautiful, disturbing and a pleasure to read, Ruth Padel's new poems are her most ambitious yet, adding animal legend and zoological science to her glitteringly imaginative canvas. With her gift for bringing together experiences and tones of voice that normally stay far apart, she sweeps us from Dulwich Pizza Hut to ancient Siberia, King's Cross to nineteenth-century Burma. We meet Socrates, urban foxes, Louisiana alligators and the endangered Amur leopard in poems resonating with sensuous delight in nature, but also with history and loss.
Finally, a Chinese painter searches for tigers in a forest doomed to the sawmill while the minister who sold it scoffs an aphrodisiac bowl of tiger-penis soup.
Hallucinatory and lyrical, passionately musical, seething with life, The Soho Leopard explores our human need for wildness- and also for stories, wherever we find them. A wonderfully ferocious new collection from one of our most exciting poets.
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A glittering imaginative riff on a broken relationship
- Christina Patterson, Independent
Sensuous... humorous, tender, flamboyant and unforgettable
- Independent
Visual, sensuous and highly seductive - as if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in
- Times Literary Supplement
Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and first Resident Writer at Somerset House, London. Her poetry collections include Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, all shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She has also published two much-loved books on reading contemporary poetry, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey, and a highly acclaimed nature book, Tigers in Red Weather, shortlisted in the US for the Kiriyama Prize.
