A Favourite Poet

Of course there are many, but in strict adherence to the brief, I'll make an 'of the moment' choice. The poet I've been reading most often in the last few months is Ruth Padel. I realise some of you may not be familiar with the name, so excuse me those who are while I furnish a few autobiographical details as background.

Ruth Padel was born in London in 1946, the eldest of five siblings, and is a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Her father was a psychoanalyst and classicist who taught his daughter Greek. Ruth studied Greek at Oxford and wrote her Ph.D on ancient Greek poetry. (You can see why I like her already.) She has taught Greek Classics at Oxford, Cambridge, London and Princeton universities and has also studied at the Sorbonne and at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, where she lived for several years. While there, she helped in the excavation of the Royal Palace at Knossos. 

As well as teaching Greek Classics, Ruth has written several critical studies on Ancient Greek literature and how its myths can inform an understanding of the modern human psyche. She is also the author of a couple of novels. I can highly recommend 'Daughters of the Labyrinth', a fictional depiction of the holocaust in Crete after the German invasion in WWII.

In addition to her affiliation to Greece and all things Greek, Ruth also has a love of music. She has sung as a member of various prestigious chamber choirs in England and France and has has taught opera. 

Her third consuming interest is in the natural world (as befits her family lineage from Darwin). She is a keen conservationist, a Fellow of the Zoological Society and a Trustee of London Zoo.

She was the first woman poet to be nominated for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

All of these consuming passions naturally inform her poetry, of which there are sixteen collections to date. Although in her own words she was "formed by the nineteenth century" in terms of cultural aesthetic and scientific learning, she is a modernist in her writing, and poetry for her is the connective tissue that unites all subjects and disciplines. I find her poetry daring, erudite, imaginative and often downright sexy. 

Ruth Padel

I've heard Ruth Padel read a number of times, and if you wish to do so, there are quite a few recordings out on YouTube. I most recently heard her as a guest poet at the Poetry Society's 2025 National Poetry Competition Winners Night, reading from her latest poetry collection, 'Girl'. The other guest poet was Australia's Debbie Lim and she was excellent too. This year's winner, Fiona Larkin, was judged to have submitted the best poem out of 20,000 entries. Them's the odds, folks. I didn't enter. I don't do competitions.

Obviously I'm going to share one of Ruth Padel's poems this week rather than one of my own. I've chosen my favourite poem from her 1998 collection 'Rembrandt Would Have Loved You'. That collection also includes the poem with which she won the 1996 National Poetry Competition, Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire, but I much prefer this one. I'll make no commentary. Read and enjoy.

Boulangerie

Still Life With Loaves, Seaweed And Wren

   

Whatever self is, I'd like mine to wake up with yours

While sleep is still plumping the skin,

Warm bread rising gently in the oven.

   An enamel oven, opened on a summer morning

In a village in Provence

By a woman who's never been unkind, whose children

And husband and lover have never been hurt.

   It's not that real a place.

I do know that. But for this moment of waking

I'm imagining, it holds

The warmest small patisserie in the world

   Which does its baking in a sloping village street

By the wall of the local château.

Relations with the château have always been brilliant.

There was no need for revolution, there wasn't one.

   It's all been OK, that side of things.

There are baguettes in the baguette corner

As there have been two hundred years

And will go on being, for in this village

   No worlds end. Light pours down the little street

With all promise of a hot day to come

But not yet, not yet. A street in which no girl

Has been ungenerous to her lover,

   No child mown down by alcoholic lorries,

No resistance fighter shot. And no Jew shopped

By neighbours who wanted his farm.

The Cathars and the Huguenots were fine.

   I'm going to reel back history for these bakers,

Map them on the road to Eden. Children will come in

For pain au chocolat and get it free.

Parents will come

   For newspapers, milk and a gossip

Which never knifes anyone in the back, not really,

And sun will spread through the doorway

Without alarming the profiteroles,

   Their glisten of chocolate, that delicate cream.

This stove is Delphi, navel of the world,

There's you and me in it, and maybe some other

Lucky loaves, expanding their crusts

   For the day to mutter 'We're together, it's OK'.

And if other sorts of loaf, seedcake or sparbunkle,

Think it all sounds pretty boring lying there -

Loom-weights in a loaf-museum, none of the mica-sparkle

   Of the scythe - they can fuck off elsewhere.

For whatever self is, I'd like mine to wake with yours,

Curls mixing on the pillow surprised - as if, seconds before,

The separate hairs weren't calcium and follicles

   But sweeping off on some quite different enterprise

Of being. Maybe hair dreams of being dandelion seed

Blown over rivers, gold forests, the motorway du sol.

These curls of ours can do that. Let them go helium-ballooning,

   Linked very lightly, as far as they want.

Or maybe they'd like to be seaweed

At the bottom of an East Aegean bay, swaying their tips

In sky-water whose ripples you can't see, only feel,

   A virtual reality of movement that gets the weeds excited

Very gently. A pure bit of sea, naturellement,

None of your oil slicks and rubbish from foreign yachts.

Yes, if the hairs want to have been that, they can,

   Then be glad to come back to us, as we wake

In this bakery whose warmth is not electronic but self-made.

The loaves created it. They'd like to stay all day

Half-dreaming they are apples in a loft, radiating Cézanne,

   Dapple-lit by a window so old it is ouzo,

Quite certain no roof will ever fall. No one visits them

Except a child, who'll remember all her life

The smell, the soft still light with dust along its spine,

   The silent, consenting apples.

Yet whatever selves are, I'd like mine to wake

And not only dream

With yours. Be risen loaves, not fixing to get eaten

   But to get their act together.

Loaves that are going to give themselves names

And float out into the world

Looking like people who get phoned up,

   Arrange meetings and deadlines, difficult lunches.

They'll be separate loaves paying their own bills

But all day in their soft loaf parts

Keep a patch of themselves away

   Where they woke up touching -

As a wren, I imagine, keeps the impress of eggs

Left hidden in her penny-size nest

When she darts out shopping, through the teeth

   Of hawthorn, for her list of things she needs.

Mayfly. Lacewing. And there they stay,

Those six-millimetre ovals, pressed

In the faint fawn-feather of her breast.

   No harm's coming to her eggs,

Nothing broken or planning to break. No need for a wren

To say sorry, or suffer anything but the warm spark 

Of morning, dawn-hunts among buds of Russian vine

   For that greenfly tickle on her tiny wren tongue

And the mercy of having woken touching

What she loves. Whatever love is for a wren.

And whatever self is, I'd like yours to wake,

   If it wouldn't mind, with mine.

                                                 Ruth Padel

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Gooseberry

One evening earlier this week, while we dined at a beachside taverna watching the sun sink into the sea off Corfu, I was regaling Adele with tales of madness from my now not so recent marriage. I was ten years in that relationship and am happily ten years out of it, if that makes sense, though some of what went on still perplexes me.

You probably realise that I'm quite a private individual and don't often share insights of a personal nature in these blogs, but I'm going to make an exception today for the given theme of gooseberry, the relevance of which will eventually become apparent.

I'm reproducing below a letter I wrote to my then wife at the end of February 2012, after a most turbulent month in our relationship. Why a letter? Because for weeks she had been refusing to talk about what happened or what lay at the root of what happened at the beginning of that month. Read it and draw your own conclusions. I have anonymised individual names and I've added some brief explanations in square parentheses [thus ]: 

                                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                                                                                            February 29th 2012

Dear A__,

I've tried to start several conversations regarding the events leading up to and including the fiasco that was my birthday week-end, but given all the hurt those events have engendered - and as we still don’t have any resolution to the bad feeling that has now lasted for a month - I thought setting the facts down in black and white might be a step in the right direction.

You and I agreed in discussion in mid-January that we would meet up with K and L [my daughters ] in London on the afternoon of Saturday 4th February for lunch and a movie, as we had done the previous year. K would need to be at the British Museum by 5pm as she was working, but you and I would do something in town in the evening, like go to a gig.

I emailed all three of you on 24th January with suggestions for movies – My Week With Marilyn being the favourite.

On Sunday 29th January you got a text from your sister informing that C [niece ] had come home early from France and you said it might be an idea to invite her as well. I said that would be fine, just let me know because it would impact how many cinema tickets I needed to book and would probably determine whether you and I went to a gig in the evening or not. You phoned her later that day and then told me that C wouldn’t be coming with us. Consequently, that evening I booked two tickets for us to see Thea Gilmore's band in Camden on Saturday night.

Then on the evening of Monday 30th you asked me if I wouldn’t rather meet up with my daughters on my own and I said categorically not. Later that evening you told me that you didn’t want to spend the whole day in London, or couldn’t afford the time, (I don’t remember the exact words you used) but would happily join me for  the gig, as it was booked. Naturally I was surprised and disappointed that you wouldn’t be there for lunch and cinema, but I respected your wishes and was pleased we would at least have a nice evening out together.

On Tuesday 31st, just before I drove up to Blackpool for the night game, I managed to find a cinema in Islington that was showing My Week With Marilyn at a time that suited, so I booked tickets for K, L and myself.

On Wednesday 1st February, I let my daughters know the time of the cinema on Saturday and fixed a place to meet for lunch beforehand. That same evening (the first time we'd spoken since Monday) you asked me what time I was going into London on Saturday and when I told you what I’d arranged, you became really angry and started shouting and swearing at me. Your stated grounds for being so upset?

- Firstly that I’d told K and L of the cinema arrangements before I mentioned them to you. The thing is, you had told me just two days earlier that you wouldn’t be coming, so the arrangements didn’t really concern you.

- Secondly that I hadn’t re-checked with you before buying the cinema tickets, in case you’d had a change of mind. Well, sorry, but you were quite definite on the subject on the Monday night, so I took that as your final answer.

- Thirdly that you hadn’t known what film I proposed booking for. That’s just not true. I had told you on Sunday, a propos of inviting your niece, that I would book for My Week With Marilyn if possible.

- Fourthly that I hadn’t extended the lunch and cinema invitation to R and S [my stepsons ]. I explained that I knew that R would be working all day Saturday and Sunday (he’d already had the previous week-end off, when he, you, K and I had been to see War Horse in London), and he wouldn’t be able to get two free Saturdays in a row; I also knew that S was on call on Saturday and wouldn’t be able to go into London. And I'd discussed with R and S that the four of us (your boys, you and I) could go out for a birthday meal on Sunday evening.

- Fifthly that I should have invited K and L out to Hemel Hempstead at the week-end so we could all do something together. Again, I pointed out that R was working on both days, S was on call, that K had to be at the BM from 5pm Saturday until 1pm Sunday and that having my daughters come out from London on Sunday night for a couple of hours didn’t seem like the best plan given that everybody (yourself in particular) likes to spend part of Sunday night getting ready for the week ahead…and I reminded you that we had discussed and agreed a week before that we would go into London on my birthday, the Saturday.

Your response to the points I made was to launch into another foul and abusive tirade followed by a succession of most unpleasant text messages. 

I told you several times over the next few days, in fact right up to the morning of my birthday, that I would love you to come to the lunch and cinema, and I was sure it would be possible to get another ticket, (as indeed it would have been, for the seat next to me was free and the cinema was two-thirds empty). You told me there was no way you were going into London at all  and certainly not as an afterthought “or a gooseberry!”

In the end, I had the unhappiest of birthdays. You refused to go the gig (and no, I didn't take somebody else instead); you decided not to give me the presents you had bought me; and you told people I had chosen to spend my birthday with my daughters rather than with you! You only grudgingly came to the meal on Sunday evening because (as you were at pains to point out) R had asked you to…and you told me that you want me to have nothing to do with your own birthday next month, when you will arrange something and I won’t be invited.

In conclusion, I feel totally beaten up over something which you precipitated. Why did any of it have to be like that? And why won't you talk to me about it? I am still mystified and miserable about the whole thing.

Steve x

Just as background, we had been together for eight years at the time. Her two sons and my two daughters had been the witnesses at our wedding, and we had socialised collectively on many occasions. Although she was given to green jealousies (she was very cool towards my female work colleagues, got very uptight when I had perfectly innocent conversations with other women at parties or gigs), I don't know why she threw what I can only characterise now as a massive wobbler over those birthday arrangements. She never did explain and never apologised for all the bad stuff she said, which included the following (I kept the text messages): 

“I wish you’d stop living.”
“I hate you and I hate your family.”
“You don’t love me enough.”
“I wish your precious daughters would die.”
“Go and live with your fucking daughters." [who didn't live together, by the way ].

 "When I said I loved you I must have been lying. Fuck off out of my life."

By the time her birthday did come around in March, normal relations had been resumed and she acted as if none of the events and exchanges related above had ever happened. It was all quite extraordinary, the idea that she should be jealous of my relationship with my daughters or consider herself to be "a gooseberry" in any of this.

I don't have a poem on theme this week, though I have a concept of a plan (as Donald Trump might put it) and a title - Did I Roll My Eyes Out Loud?  - so something gooseberry-related will gell eventually. I was planning on sharing Simon Armitage's excellent 'Gooseberry Season' with you, but I note that both the other dead good blogs this week have quoted it. So I will go with something by the wonderful Ruth Padel instead, not the whole of her poem 'Writing To Onegin' (for it is very long), but the stanza that mentions the fruit...and reminds us that not all gooseberries are green.

(from) Writing To Onegin

So cut, weeks later, to an outside shot: the same girl

Taking cover ("Dear God, he's here, he's come!") 

Under fat red gooseberries, glimmering hairy stars: 

The old, rude bushes she has hide-and-seeked in all 

 Her life, where mother commands the serfs to sing 

While picking, so they can't hurl 

The odd gog into their mouths.
No one could spy 

Her here, not even the sun in its burn-time.
Her cheeks 

Are simmering fire...

                                                         Ruth Padel, 1999

 

  

  

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Forelegs Good!

Quite how we ever learned to balance so well on our hind legs without the assistance of a powerful tail we shall never know. That secret (along with the tail) lies lost, several millions years back along the evolutionary trail, in the East African Rift Valley of our distant ancestors.

We've gotten to be pretty useful with our forelegs though, more so than any other species on the planet. We learned how to make tools and clothes, how to dress ourselves, how to tear our hair out, how to draw, paint, write, play musical instruments, pick our noses, drive cars, fire guns and press nuclear buttons.

Of course this week's theme of Four Legs Good (which I've wilfully misinterpreted so as not to repeat what others have already written) derives from a slogan coined by George Orwell - 'Four legs good, two legs bad' - in his political allegory of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, a story in which the animals of Manor Farm rebel against their two-legged overlord, Farmer Jones.

Orwell, born Eric Blair in India in 1903, chose his pen name for his love of the Suffolk river Orwell. He could conceivably have gone for Horatio Stour or Rudyard Gipping (for the Stour and the Gipping lie in close proximity), only he didn't - and that's enough about him for now, although he remains one of my favourite English authors of the mid-20th century.

In his famous farm fable, Orwell wrote about how the pigs, leaders of the revolution, gradually became more like the oppressors they had overthrown as power began to corrupt their ideals. The slogan was amended to read 'Four legs good, two legs better' as the pigs took to aping men (ding! - pun intended) by strutting around upright  on their rear trotters - a wicked satire, though fanciful, of course.

It got me researching four-legged creatures that actually do stand on their hind legs at times so as to put their forelegs to good purpose. The list is a long one, when you think about it: bears, meerkats, squirrels among the most obvious. I knew about hares boxing on hind legs but I was intrigued to discover that foxes do the same.


Fox Boxing Day!

They rear up on hind legs and face off in feats of strength, usually resting their forelegs on their opponent's chest or shoulders and pushing as hard as they can. In truth, it's probably closer to wrestling than boxing - and even closer to plain shoving, but fox boxing has a ring to it (ding again!) so I'm going to stick with the more resonant phrase.

Cubs acquire this behaviour as early as ten weeks old; it forms part of their learning play, is used to settle sibling squabbles and to establish a hierarchy. Male foxes occasionally indulge in the practice to settle territorial disputes (though they more commonly resort to ground-level tussles involving much rolling and nipping).

Sometimes a dog fox and vixen act in this way (as photographed above) and the almost dance-like quality of such performances has given us the term foxtrot for the lively ballroom dance consisting of quick and slow steps. However, I was delighted to learn that fox boxing is most common among vixens. Go bitches!


Vixens Mixing It!

The females of the species resort to fox boxing to settle domestic squabbles, competition for male attention and general uppityness. The rules of the game appear to be very simple: you rear, you engage, you snarl (as shown above) and you just keep pushing until one or other fox falls over. A single fall or submission decides the bout; last fox standing wins; and there is rarely any physical injury sustained, merely loss of pride for the loser.

I thought I'd have a go at writing a poem about boxing foxes with foxgloves off, inspired by my research - but it's not made the cut, so will get completed at a later date. In its place, a brace of foxy loxy poems by a couple of poets I admire. I hope they serve as adequate substitutes.

The first is from the wonderful John Clare (1793-1864).

The Vixen
Among the taller wood with ivy hung
The old fox plays and dances round her young.
She snuffs and barks if any passes by
And swings her tail and turns prepared to fly.
The horseman hurries by: she bolts to see
And turns again, from danger never free.
If any stands she runs among the poles
And barks and snaps and drives them in the holes.
The shepherd sees them and the boy goes by
And gets a stick and progs the hole to try:
They get all still and lie in safety sure
And out again when safety is secure
And start and snap at blackbirds bouncing by
To fight and catch the great white butterfly.

                                                               John Clare

The second is from the equally wonderful Ruth Padel (1946 -     ) from a series of twelve monthly poems about her urban neighbours 'The King's Cross Foxes'.

Excavation

Travelling ends. Fur's losing condition.

Each ginger hair-tip will snap. Rubbed patches appear

on the rump as they squeeze into underground tunnels,

flatten themselves under fences in wet sieve of rain,

scuff through concrete holes, four inches square.

Greeting the year with a clear soul, the looks

for a family earth. Her mother, her grandmothers, dug

in cement - under lock-ups, a doorstep, a grave;

this tower of Ford Capris in a breaker's yard.

Try these twigshadow brambles, back door to the Free

Metal disco, a narrow space in Argyle Walk above

a fourth-floor false ceiling; the architects' office.

Flub in through an air-brick and broken pane

to some under-the-kitchen haven in Brill Place.

Go on, sweetheart, look, all dry; and warmed

by the cladding and pipes. Room for the cubs to play...

No way. Fifty days pregnant, three to go, she's eeling

under a flatpack shed on Coopers Lane.

                                                                Ruth Padel

Thanks for reading. Have a happy Bank Holiday weekend, S ;-)

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