CityLife

Interview: Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel

IT’S hard to imagine a more fitting figure to pay tribute to Charles Darwin in celebration of his bicentenary than his great great granddaughter, Ruth Padel.

One of the country’s foremost poets and a fellow of the Zoological Society, Padel recently trekked though the forests of Asia exploring grassroots conservation of tigers – not something that can be said of many poets – leading one to wonder whether that Darwinian gene has something to answer for.

Her latest collection, Darwin: A Life In Poems, is a biography in poetry developed from her ancestor’s personal letters and journals, detailing significant events such as his marriage to his first cousin Emma, and the death of their young daughter Annie, which he later attributed to their inbreeding.

'Human and funny'

The poems make much of the relationship between his scientific theories and internal emotional life and the resultant Darwin emerges as a real person, as opposed to a mere conduit for his ideas.

“I felt increasingly close to him while working on them,” Padel says.

“The letters, especially, are so human and funny. And when I came to his wife Emma, I felt I recognized in her traits of my mother, and of her mother Nora Barlow, née Darwin, who was Charles’ granddaughter and my much loved granny.

“I never realised so many people felt so linked to him. He had such a multi-faceted mind, and so many interests. It has been overwhelming.”

Padel’s own interests are broad-ranging, and her subject matter diverse. Well-known for her romantic poems, particularly the acclaimed collection Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, she has also published a book on the mythic roots of rock music as well as two popular studies of contemporary poetry. Her present work addresses animal migration and human immigration. So what inspires her?

'A whole new dimension'

“As with every poet, it is intensity that provides the electric charge that begins a poem. I found that particularly in tiger forests, but all the great traditional subjects are inspiring too. You can make wine from old tea leaves or the leather of discarded boots, and you can make a poem from anything. Poets need to go on to the new thing, the unsaid.”

From an early age “poems just seemed a sensible way of seeing the world”, but it was Kipling’s Jungle Books that made the greatest impression on the young Padel.

“I always felt I belonged among the shadows of that jungle,” she says. “When I went to Khana (in India), where Kipling set those stories, I felt I had discovered a whole new dimension of what I wanted to write.”

Unusually for a poet of her stature, Padel has not accepted a university creative writing post (“I don’t want the administration that goes with a normal teaching job to get in the way of books”), but earlier this year she was elected the first female Oxford professor of poetry.

'All writing involves risk'

She hit the headlines when she stepped down after just nine days following accusations of involvement in a smear campaign against her principle rival for the position, but maintains her actions were not malicious, rather “naive and silly – a bad error of judgement”.

“I’m desperate to write,” she says. “That was the appeal of the Oxford job for me – a lot of freedom to contact students in creative ways, like making links between poetry and science.

“I also care that women poets and women critics are listened to more than they have been in the past. But now I’ve gone back to the collections I was working on when Darwin torpedoed me. Next year I’m publishing my first novel, Where The Serpent Lives, which is an intimidating moment. But hey, all writing involves risk.

“You don’t write to be safe.”

Ruth Padel will be reading from Darwin – A Life In Poems on Thursday, October 15, at the Manchester Museum.