Foyles

This item has been added to your basket

View Basket

Darwin
A Life in Poems

Synopsis:

Charles Darwin lost his mother at the age of eight, repressed all memory of her, and poured his passion into newt collecting and shooting. As a young man, his five year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle changed his life. Afterwards, working privately on groundbreaking theories about the development of species, he published his geological findings. He also made a nervous proposal to his cousin Emma. They had a very happy marriage but both were painfully aware of the gulf between her devout Christian faith and his increasing religious doubt. The death of three of their ten children accentuated this gulf. For Darwin, death and extinction were nature's way of developing new species: the survival of the fittest. For Emma, death was a prelude to the afterlife. In these extraordinary poems, using multiple viewpoints - even, at one point, the orangutang at London Zoo - Ruth Padel follows the development of Darwin's thought, the drama of the discovery of evolution, and fluctuating emotions in Darwin the husband, the naturalist and the tender father, in a powerful tribute to her famous forbear.

Author Biography:

Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Fellow of the Zoological Society of London. She has written seven poetry collections, including Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her travel book, Tigers in Red Weather was highly acclaimed and she is also well known for her popular works of poetry criticism, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. Ruth Padel is the great-great-granddaughter of scientist and author Charles Darwin.

Additional Information:

Promotional: An intimate and highly original interpretation of the life and work of Charles Darwin, published to coincide with the bicentenary of his birth, by acclaimed poet and direct descendant Ruth Padel. Related subjects: Poetry texts & anthologies