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Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, author of thirteen acclaimed poetry collections and prose works including much-loved books on reading contemporary poetry, a travel-memoir on wild tiger conservation, and a study of the influence of Greek myth on rock music. Awards include a British Council Darwin Now Award, a Travel Bursary and Cholmondley Award from The Society of Authors, and First Prize in the National Poetry Competition. She is Professor of Poetry at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.A <b>profoundly moving, complex, glittering elegy</b> for her brilliant mother
- Bel Mooney, Daily Mail
<i>Emerald</i> is <b>a book of a wild and generous imagination from a writer at the peak of her powers</b>. It offers up a rich excavation of the truths and mysteries found in grief – and should be of interest to any reader concerned with the limitations and beauty of the human condition. Padel has created <b>a collection that is very much alive with uniquely restless, questioning intensity</b>
- Sarah Westcott, Poetry School
<i>Emerald</i>’s themes are <b>broad</b> as well as attentive to the <b>intimate</b>. Padel writes with <b>an acute awareness that the mundane can gesture towards the profound</b>
- Carla-Rosa Manfredino, Times Literary Supplement
If Ruth Padel is one our <b>national treasures</b> – and she most certainly is – then her latest book of poems will surely rank as one of <b>her greatest achievements to date</b>... lyrical reflections on the human condition... an intensely beautiful portrait of final farewells... Padel has made great art out of her ingenious – and utterly satisfying – blending of lyric memoir, natural history, and travel writing, defying the limitations poets all too often place on themselves... <b>Everyone should read <i>Emerald</i>, it's as valuable as the title implies</b>
- André Naffis-Sahely, Ambit
Padel capture(s) small details with <b>a lightness and freshness which has genuine staying power</b>. Her skill at selecting the telling visual moment implies how a good parent may extend and deepen their child’s understanding of the world. It also enacts its own process of hidden things becoming visible, part of the labour of emerald mining and cutting that Padel explores to illustrate her passage into healing
- Alice Hiller, The Poetry Review
Ruth Padel's story, of a daughter's love for her mother, allows her to reach for <b>a movingly selfless language of human relations</b>. She brings back <b>never-before-seen jewels</b> from those places where the mind goes to take refuge from grief
- Hugo Williams,
An elegy to a lost mother, Emerald is the moving new collection from prize-winning poet Ruth Padel
‘Here in deep earth, the black
blossom of mourning still sifting within me
I remembered that emerald was my birthstone …’
Prize-winning poet Ruth Padel’s heartfelt new collection is a grief observed: an elegy for her mother on her death at the age of ninety-seven.
Exploring the riches of emerald lore, Padel follows the glint of green – ‘green for awakening / for bringing life back from the dead’ – from memories of her mother, a naturalist, to the black honeycomb of a Colombian emerald mine and sunset-pink of the Emerald City, Jaipur. Beneath everything shines the jewel itself, ‘the only stone in which the flaws are prized’.
Beautifully carved and cadenced, Emerald is a moving chronicle of value and loss, and a celebration of all that is precious in the life that remains.