Book description
Beautiful, disturbing and a pleasure to read, Ruth Padel's new poems
are her most ambitious yet, adding animal legend and zoological
science to her glitteringly imaginative canvas. With her gift for
bringing together experiences and tones of voice that normally stay
far apart, she sweeps us from Dulwich Pizza Hut to ancient Siberia,
King's Cross to nineteenth-century Burma. We meet Socrates, urban
foxes, Louisiana alligators and the endangered Amur leopard in poems
resonating with sensuous delight in nature, but also with history and loss.
Finally, a Chinese painter searches for tigers in a forest doomed to
the sawmill while the minister who sold it scoffs an aphrodisiac bowl
of tiger-penis soup.
Hallucinatory and lyrical, passionately musical, seething with life,
The Soho Leopard explores our human need for wildness- and
also for stories, wherever we find them. A wonderfully ferocious new
collection from one of our most exciting poets.
Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, Fellow of both the Royal Society
of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and first Resident
Writer at Somerset House, London. Her poetry collections include
Rembrandt Would Have Loved You,
Voodoo Shop
and
The Soho Leopard,
all
shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She has also published two
much-loved books on reading contemporary poetry,
52 Ways of Looking
at a Poem
and
The Poem and the Journey,
and a highly acclaimed nature book,
Tigers in Red Weather
, shortlisted in the US for the Kiriyama Prize
.
