{"id":2216,"date":"2019-10-10T20:09:28","date_gmt":"2019-10-10T20:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2216"},"modified":"2019-10-10T20:12:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-10T20:12:00","slug":"ruth-padels-emerald-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2216","title":{"rendered":"Ruth Padel’s Emerald – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ruth Padel, Emerald<\/em>, 80 pp, \u00a310, Chatto & Windus, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Rd, Westminster, London SW1V 2SA<\/p>\n

In Emerald<\/em>, emotional intensity flowers out of artistic restraint and its carefully measured statements achieve wide resonance. The book brings together poems prompted by the death of the poet\u2019s mother and poems about the cutting and mining of emeralds or more generally about greenness. Grief and loss lie alongside beauty and hope, mundane experience is juxtaposed with travel, history, scientific analysis, fairytale and myth. Modes of discourse shift accordingly, though it hardly ever feels as though contrast between modes is the point. The shifts are more like the play of light in a piece of opal as you turn it: one colour simply changes into another.<\/p>\n

Barely punctuated except by full stops, line endings and spaces within lines, the poems combine assured control of rhythm and syntax with an air of breathless tentativeness. Particularly in those that are strongly indented, it\u2019s as though ideas and images come together as we read, like the shape-shifting forms taken on by a flock of starlings in flight. These impressions are vivid and intense while they last. They and the poet\u2019s arcs of thought form clear structures in our minds but because they\u2019re so little signalled by punctuation we have to feel our way carefully though them, and they seem to dissolve into white space as we move on.<\/p>\n

In the moving individual poems about Padel\u2019s mother, rare but powerful direct expressions of emotion cut through prosaic details of the processes of aging and dying. The mother\u2019s personality is evoked in anecdotes of her past, like the poignant \u2018Gorey Bay, Jersey, 1933\u2019, and in snatches of convincing dialogue. An example of the latter appears when a fanciful rewriting of Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnet 60 is followed by the gently devastating \u2018Appraisal\u2019:<\/p>\n

I liked that\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 said my mum.
\nMakes it all sound
\nnot quite so bad. Read it again.
\nWhat\u2019s the main of light?<\/p>\n

Superficially unrelated poems about the green flash at sunset, emerald mining or a rare humming bird are made to interact with poems about the mother by echoing or playing against something in their feeling, phrasing or ideas. However, it\u2019s the opening and closing poems, \u2018The Emerald Tablet\u2019 and \u2018Salon Noir\u2019 that bind the book into a unity.\u00a0 \u2018Salon Noir\u2019 in particular broadens into a searching meditation on life and mortality, setting the mother\u2019s death in the context of geological time and the human journey since the Old Stone Age without losing touch with the personal or evaporating into abstraction and generality. A description of a trip into a prehistoric painted cave, it opens with the poet and her family still in mourning and includes a tender tribute to the mother\u2019s gift for noticing animals, implicitly related to the eye of the Palaeolithic artist. This is interwoven with other themes \u2013 art, rebirth, the wonder of life \u2013 in a way it would take a chapter to explore. Literal description is beautifully interwoven with references to myth. Explicit allusions to Orpheus bring out implicit mythic resonances elsewhere, as here:<\/p>\n

Take nothing\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 said the guide\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 a girl
\nfrom the green hills of the Ari\u00e8ge
\nwho knew every centimetre of the caves.<\/p>\n

Leave behind
\nall bags and mobile phones.
\nYou\u2019re not allowed to take pictures<\/p>\n

and you\u2019ll need your hands.
\nThe path is slippery
\nBroken\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 rough<\/p>\n

you have to crouch
\nyou\u2019ll be carrying a heavy torch
\nbut don\u2019t touch the walls<\/p>\n

if you stumble. Even your breath
\neach in-and-out of oxygen
\ndoes a little destroying.<\/p>\n

Return from the underworld to the bright light of day is a kind of rebirth, a recovery of beauty, hope and a faith in life that implicitly accepts transience and mortality:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the dancers\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the mothers\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 were gone into the hill.
\nBut the mountains\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 rising one behind the other
\nwere herds of green bison\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 drifting away into the sky.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom for their permission to repost this review, written for The North issue 62. My earlier postings on Emerald,<\/em> focusing more closely on individual poems, were written after this overview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ruth Padel, Emerald, 80 pp, \u00a310, Chatto & Windus, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Rd, Westminster, London SW1V 2SA In Emerald, emotional intensity flowers out of artistic restraint and its carefully measured statements achieve wide resonance. The book brings together poems prompted by the death of the poet\u2019s mother and poems about the cutting and mining of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ruth-padel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2216"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2220,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216\/revisions\/2220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}