Book description
Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home?
And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain?
In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes,
Ruth Padel's original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature and
human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.
'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the
millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle
raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar
and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave
a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa.
Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the
greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive
portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the
Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding
migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees
labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose
of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival.
Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a
magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of
Darwin: A Life in Poems.
Ruth Padel
is a prizewinning poet, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature
and of the Zoological Society of London, and first Resident Writer at
Somerset House, London. Her collections include
Rembrandt Would Have
Loved You
,
Voodoo Shop
and
The Soho Leopard
, all shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and most recently
Darwin: A Life in Poems
, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. Highly acclaimed for her
nature writing in a book about conservation,
Tigers in Red Weather,
and her novel,
Where the Serpent Lives
, she has also published two much-loved books on contemporary poetry,
52 Ways of Looking at a Poem
and
The Poem and the Journey
.
