Whenever I read Ruth Padel’s work, it strikes me: the profusion of species. Her latest collection of poetry, Girl, organised in three parts, is no exception. If the whole book could be a single picture, I imagine it would be the silhouette of a girl-woman within whose outline, every other creature of the primordial garden, of Earth itself, is depicted. Padel’s young Earth-mother holds all that is in seeming opposition – at least from our traditional patriarchal readings – and reunites them through the Word according to Ruth. Thus snake and woman, the inorganic and organic, pain and joy, the safety of the interior and the hostile worldly world are reconciled through a celebration of diversity, emotional, geographic and cultural.
Language as a redeemer
Through this reconciliation, language itself becomes the redeemer. As reader. I feel the urge to coin a new collective noun to describe the verses, especially the poems in Part One, When the Angel Comes for You. In my mind, these comprise “A Redemption of Goldfinches”, for this is how the words feel to me: deft, wondrous, golden and on the wing.
“You were alone you thought / A bud on a winter stalk” the narrative voice of “You, Girl” tells her/us. In “Take him Out into the World”, “some buzzard wing / is hanging over you and your child.” Soon after, “The clouds are white berries in a dawn-gold sky / as if the world died in the night and woke up new.”
The density of metaphor increases in “What Does the Goldfinch Say”, when the narrative voice questions this small, seemingly vulnerable finch (an endangered bird that usually flocks in “charms”): how does she nurture and protect her vulnerable young, at constant mercy of the elements? Her offspring will face “a life of being swept about on the whipping stem of a teasel”, yet she is resilient, evolved to weather the storms.
Reading this poem recalls the work of Padel’s great-great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, whose extensive work on the Galapagos finches paved the way for his later famous thoughts on evolution. Padel, evolved as she is from this particular strand of humanity, goes further, considering ever-so-subtly how physically different, yet how similar maternal instincts across the species can be, even in non-mammalian examples, like the Goldfinch.
The beauty here is that the poetry stops short of being anthropomorphic or cloying: there is simply a clear-sighted, closely observed connection between all those who inhabit the Earth, be they human, animal, avian or vegetal. When I ask Ruth, in an aside, which species she would like to reincarnate as if she could choose, she surprises me by suggesting a Gibbon. “I love their improvised singing together”, she explains.
In “Last Breath”, there is great poignancy in the redemptive power of plant life as the poet places a wildflower bouquet in the hand of her deceased mother. “I went out into the February evening under a moon capsized like a canoe / picked a spike of myrtle a few snowdrops / nodding their fresh white and green / and put them into her hands/with a blackbird fluting away into the dark.”
The titles of the poems in Girl often bring to mind the detailed scientific, yet poetic titles Darwin chose for his own books: reflecting on these, I feel they are small like poems in themselves, or at least provocations to create poems. Take, for example, “The Power of Movement in Plants” (1880) or “The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms” (1881). Such intriguing concepts must surely have prompted titles of Padel’s earlier poetry in Darwin: A Life in Poems. “He Reads that the Membrane in a Goldfinch Egg is Proof of Divine Design”, “On the Propagation of Mistletoe” and “A Sacred Feeling About Orchids” all emphasise the importance – and perhaps mystery – of the noun, through their capitalisation.
The poet as a child
In Part II Under the Flesh and Dream of Who You Are is the Truth of Who You Are, experiences related are more personal, therefore more intimate. We catch glimpses of the poet as a child, of objects that caught her eye (“The wooden angel on the stairs / clay statuette of a tired horse”), of first-time experiences – bee sting, “golden hairs on my arms”, the scrapes and falls and triumphs of physical achievements, like climbing onto a carthorse’s broad bare back. “Jungle”, Padel relates, “was where I was never afraid.” With this in mind, I ask Ruth if there are aspects of her own girlhood which are missing in the lives of young girls today. “Above all, the safety to explore in nature – no one worried about me wandering over Hampstead Heath alone with a dog at the age of nine as they probably would today – and that (Hampstead Heath) is not even wild nature!” Aware that the book is dedicated in part to “all our girls”, I ask Ruth what advice she would give to young parents today, which qualities they should actively encourage in their girls: “Independence, of course,” she replies. “Awareness of your own power and the kindness to use it carefully, for your own and others’ good. Being able to ask yourself what you are really feeling, and why, and how can you take it forward – what you can do with what you feel.”
Throughout Part II, Padel’s poetry continues to compare physical human qualities to those of creature and mineral as she describes “the clear cave of the soul”, a voice “like wild / honey dripping from a tree” and herself as a child “slithering along…like a salamander in some overlooked cave…” Sometimes, the vegetal is compared to animal: an olive grove “thick as fur”; sometimes, mineral is compared to vegetal: “the intimate slime of damp rock”. Always, there is this connection, as if all form stems from one single immense biological entity, “the oracle centre of the Earth”.
I wonder if Padel feels Divinity is in the detail of the natural world, or whether that presence is still ineffable, remote, other-worldly. “I think for me divinity is very close to nature”, she replies. “But so is the kindness of relationships, feelings, and interactions, whether with other people or with nature.”
It would seem that this journey to the centre of the earth, to who we are as a species and who we could become is as much an emotional as it is an anthropological, spiritual quest for Padel. In a moment of heightened eco-awareness, Padel writes of how “we have let this earth burn / like forgotten bread. / I think of places I’ve found sacred/in my life where a girl / can find clarity on who she is.” Let us pray that Padel is prescient – and I believe she is – when she imagines the goddess sharing “a thread into the earth of ourselves and the wild.”
The mystery of Earth’s very own heart
The final segment of Girl, Lady of the Labyrinth, has the feel of language like a snake being “poured” into the poet’s hands, and occasionally, a nostalgic sense of loss:
This shape poem, “Snake Wrangling in the Wild”, one of six calligrams, slithers across two pages, realistically tracing a snake’s shape and movement.
Returning to Darwin, who was also extremely interested in the residual hind “legs” of the boa constrictor, understanding this left-over part to exemplify the evolutionary slipperiness of one genus to another over time, I sense the same investigation of evolution and blurred boundaries in Padel’s work through her study of Kundalini and snake worship. The protected and protective coiled snake form is imitated in the shape of the poem “Imagining the Sign for Snake in Linear A” and we are led to ask ourselves: is it Snake herself, or her translated goddess counterpart which bestows magical protection and power?
Through this final section’s archaeological painting of images and relief carving through word, we conclude our journey in the Museum of Girl rather than through the alive (Part 2) or allegorical (Part 1) experiences of this deep adventure.
By stipulating the realm of Girl in different and distinct artistic and cultural contexts, we arrive at a global understanding: the Labyrinth is not some terrifying underworld to be feared, but rather the powerful mystery of Earth’s very own heart, to be traversed only through understanding our own snake-mother wisdoms, fully cognisant of the channels and tunnels, navigating via rhythm and intuition rather than an over-reliance on logic and the more obvious senses of sight and hearing.
It is clear from her poems that Padel has found peace in multiple places on Earth: “Many, many places in India, especially forests,” she tells me. “Beautiful architecture, especially churches, mosques and temples, often preferring the small scale to the large. Certain cities, mainly European, both for their architecture and because of their personal associations for me. Wild areas in the West Country of England, Cornwall, Devon; also the North, the Lake District; and Scotland, especially the Western Isles and Bute. Ireland, oh so many places, especially West Cork and Kerry. Researching tigers and elephants I found the Golden Triangle, where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet… Ι’d love to go to Kashmir, and Georgia, and Sicily. So much world…”
So much world indeed, both beyond our immediate and personal horizons and within the covers of Padel’s insightful book. In “Mama and the Sea”, Padel catches “just a swirl / of Shakti” in an old photograph of her mother, taken possibly before she was born, certainly at a time when her mother was “Girl” too, glancing over “one bare shoulder” at the camera. This essence of “ocean foam / in the shape of a teenage girl” unites us all, no matter what age, at whichever stage we are in the journey from Girl to Woman to Elder.
Pondering this universal oneness, I ask Padel what advice she has for 21st-century girls on the cusp of adolescence, on the cusp of womanhood, beginning to navigate their passages on our burning Earth at this critical time in human history. Ruth’s response is gentle, compassionate and wise. “Be kind, to yourself and everyone else; be generous and brave; keep exploring; cherish people who make you laugh…” With these qualities and attributes, surely Girl stands a chance of rescuing the remaining – and redemptive – love and beauty on Earth: an Earth which has the capacity to revive, heal and reveal ever-deeper secrets to those of us who like Padel, are willing to nurture and revere Her.
Girl, Ruth Padel, Chatto & Windus.
