Darwin : a life in poems / Ruth Padel.

By:

Padel, Ruth, 1946-

Material type: Text

TextPublication details: London : Chatto & Windus, 2009.Description: xviii, 141 p. ; 22 cmISBN:

9780701183851 (hbk.)
0701183853 (hbk.)

Subject(s):

LOC classification:

PR6066.A2739 D37 2009

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Standard Loan	Thurles Library Main Collection	821.914 PAD (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		R16740WKRC

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In this new sequence of poems using multiple viewpoints, Ruth Padel follows not only the development of the great scientists professional thought, and the drama of the discovery of evolution, but also imagines the fluctuating emotions within Darwin, the private man and tender father.

Includes bibliographical references.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

CHAPTER ONE BOY 1809--1831 FINDING THE NAME IN THE FLOWER I THE CHAPEL SCHOOL 'He brought a flower to school. He said his mother taught him to look inside the blossom and discover the name of the plant. I inquired how it could be done but the lesson was not transmissible.' A walk through the zebra maze, to the Unitarian chapel on Claremont Hill. What do they say, the black stripes on white house-walls? He 's afraid of the dogs on Baker Street. When boys play he chews the inside of his mouth. He can never fight. Darwin grew up in Shrewsbury, a medieval English town on the border of Wales, where his father built a house in 1800. Early in 1817, when he was a timid boy of seven, his mother enrolled him in a small school attached to the Chapel in town. The words quoted here come from the earliest memory of Darwin by anyone other than his family: William Leighton, an older pupil at the school who later became a botanist. II THE YEAR MY MOTHER DIED 'I remember her sewing-table, curiously constructed. Her black velvet gown. Nothing else except her death-bed. And my Father, crying.' No embrace. 'My older sisters, in their great grief, did not speak her name.' Her memory was silence. No memento of her face. Darwin's mother Susanna, daughter of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, died young in July 1817, when Darwin was eight. III STEALING THE AFFECTION OF DOGS He does not seem to have known half how much our father loved him. --Caroline Wedgwood, née Darwin Bits of the world blow towards him and come apart on the wind. He invents. He lies. 'I had a passion for dogs. They seemed to know. I was adept in robbing their masters of their love.' He steals apples from the orchard, gives them to boys in a cottage and tells them to watch how fast he runs. He climbs a beech by the wall of the locked kitchen garden and dreams himself into the inner gloss of raspberry canes. A forest, glowing in its net. Emerald coal in a watchman's brazier. He straddles the coping, fits a stick in the hole at the foot of a flower-pot, and pulls. Peaches and plums fall in. Enough to have begun an orchard of his own. My father's. Valuable. The words hang in the trees when the soft blobs are gone. He hides his loot in shrubbery and runs to tell: he has found a hoard of stolen fruit! The Mount, Shrewsbury, 1817--20. Excerpted from Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet with seven poetry collections to her name, including Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard , both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.