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| Interview with Ruth Padel by Melanie Ashby TIGERS paper Ruth Padel’s toilet, where fifty pairs of amber eyes look out from the walls. With the Charles Darwin on her mother’s side of the family, an interest in the animal kingdom was bound to emerge in her work at some point, and over the last year or so beasts have been slinking out of captivity and onto the page. You may have already caught her big cat short stories in the Mail or her ‘Wild Thing’ column in the Times, and can look forward to a book about wild tigers in Asia and a poetry collection, The Soho Leopard, due out in 2004. At the kitchen table she introduces a patterned wooden jaguar that is whipping round to flash a tooth-filled smile. Padel, an elegant gazelle on stilt-thin legs, darts over to the stove to pour out a coffee and puts it down next to the beast. The big cat is a present from Mexico, she says admiringly, describing its shape with her hands: ‘Just look how you’ve got a wonderful sense of movement in the actual structure, while the surface is doing something very different.’ We’re straight into a discussion about poetry, and the jaguar’s become an analogy for the way Ancient Greek poets like Euripides and Socrates laced the grand, highly-wrought form of Greek Tragedy with playful complex adjectives – like the patterns on the beast. ‘A kind of strength with delicacy,’ she says, describing the effect achieved by Gerard Manley Hopkins when he yoked words together, following the Greek poets. She tells me about his thesis on the Greek choral lyric, which she’d really love to see. Ruth Padel is hugely erudite; she’s a treasure trove of knowledge formed over 20-odd years as an Oxford classics scholar researching two chunky books on Greek Tragedy. But while antique references and a subtle awareness of classical forms thread through her poems, it’s important to her they don’t read as overly sophisticated or elitist. ‘It can look terribly show-offy… For the whole interview, read Issue 17 » Subscribe! Go to » Ruth Padel's Method |
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For more on RUTH PADEL, go to www.rpadel.dircon.co.uk
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