Search Results

“... Versions of Alligator Creation She made the world’s first alligator from a spine    Of sugar-cane, Binding the spring growth’s joints and knuckles,    Then rind-peelings, The eyes from saffron, tail from the leaves and fruit    Of betel-nut, Clay mould from a sheet of upish,    Squelching from sheaths Of betel-nut palm: and prayed    It might have life ...”

“... Red Syncopated Green You’ve given away your temple, Lord, your altar-stone, dun flame of burning myrrh, oil poured in long libation, soaking into turf; smoke rising to your sky from incense-sacrifices kindled by our grandfathers. You’ve given away our wall-of-the-world liana-twined batik – the holy mountain, dipterocarp, deciduous, evergreen, where panther pugs are secrets in black earth on ivy-lattice ridge-trails; wolf-shadows where cedars flush in dawn’s first light under first winter snow ...”

“... Annie listless.’ They take her to Ramsgate    to try what seawater can do. On the beachhe picks up shells. He is still a collector. Emma    watches a bathing-woman in baggy bluecoax Annie to the caravan-machine    drawn by two horses out to sea; and thinks throughin her head a Beethoven sonata and cadenza.In autumn 1850 Darwin’s ten-year-old daughter Annie was ill ...”

“... The highlight of the year, for a small singing group I belong to, is an evening’s work with a conductor who specialises in 16th-century music. We practise hard in advance. Our repertoire is English and Italian madrigals, and this year we had two by Monteverdi but were divided over which English one to choose. We sight-read a massive six-voice piece by Thomas Weelkes, ‘Thule, the Period of Cosmographie’, with its second part, ‘The Andalusian Merchant ...”

“... In the 1640s, every musical household in Italy had a copy of ‘Ariadne’s Lament’, high-spot of Monteverdi’s Arianna and his most famous song. The lament expressed the opera’s theme: abandonment. Monteverdi called it Arianna’s ‘most fundamental part’. There have been many Ariadnes since. Cambert, Marcello, Porpora, Handel, Strauss: only Dido can challenge the number of times Ariadne magnetises ‘abandoned’ to her name ...”

“... in most American universities: ‘My body, too, has felt this thrill of pain.’ After reading Ruth Padel, one would understand, even if one did not know a word of Greek, that the women of Troezen were describing Phaedra’s disease in the same language that ancient doctors used. Pain and passion are breathed into the body from outside; madness is a ...”

“... denunciations has (mostly) lowered. Wholly and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last ...”

“... teenage boys if they could just cease strumming for a moment and stop fiddling with their hair.* Ruth Padel is not a teenage boy and in her brilliant, frantic, wide-ranging I’m A Man (2000) she makes the connections between rock and myth absolutely plain (partly by using capital letters): JIM MORRISON FOUND DEAD IN BATH IN PARIS? Wife Clytemnestra ...”

“... work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. And Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter Ruth Padel published Darwin: A Life in Poems, evoking the emotional nexus from which the Origin emerged:        ‘I never dreamedthat islands sixty miles apart, made of the            same stone, of nearly equal ...”