RESULTS

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.

Hallucinatory and lyrical, these poems cross Dulwich Pizza Hut with mating alligators, endangered animal species with stage directions for Beauty and the Beast. Making wild connections over space and time, Ruth Padel's new collection displays her gift for getting into the same register areas of life that are normally far apart. Full of wild life and colour, black and gold, The Soho Leopard explores new extremes of Padel's voice, range and poetics, linking mythology and zoological science to her rich descriptive powers, vivid speaking voice and the passion and sensuality of her language. Starting from London streets, Soho and Kings Cross, the poems reach out to the Amazon, Siberia, Mexico, Louisiana wetlands, Mayan myth, ancient Athenian politicians, Tudor England, and our human need for stories. Thoughts turn into music in an enchanted castle, a crocodile-god waves the feather of truth at Judas, a downloaded Buddha opens his eyes when highlit on a laptop.

A collection of poems which begins with a love letter and ends with a haunting meditation on departure and migration. Each poem is a seperate dramatic scenario with a varied cast of characters, but taken all together they enact a single love story.