‘Girl’: The vitality of multispecies life is evident in Ruth Padel’s latest book of poems

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…

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