Angel

"Many poets wait a lifetime for a poem like this and still don't get one". Poetry Book Society Recommendation 1993. "Angel focusses on multiple ways of seeing, across different personas and across history...Angel was Ruth's second full collection. It opens with voices from Bedlam: a demented starling, a GI on trial, remembering scenes from Apocalypse Now, and an alien apparently planning world takeover from the sea bed. Part II sets these in a background of war, a world in might be mad not to go mad in. Part III expresses the same thing through erotic narratives of lunatic innocence to which Part IV adds myths and historical perspectives. Part V suggests the previous poems could have come from a patient, hiding behind a mask of invented voices." REVIEWS: "Who or what is Padel's angel? A voice outside ourselves, a changing shape, a cheeky cherubic thing, a madness, a glorious energy and a fall from grace. Like the best writer of fictions, Padel slides easily into the skins of others. A fierce intellect supplying violent turbulent poems of a world where nothing stays still for long, using myth and reinterpreting history playfully to show us a universe constantly reinventing itself." (Maura Dooley, Acumen). "Religious language is a strong source of vocabulary among the already spectacular collection in her possession. Her work is very powerful: as in the stunning poem "Harvest Moon". Many poets wait a lifetime for a poem like this and still don't get one". Poetry Review