Voodoo Shop

In Voodoo Shop, her collection of new verse, Ruth Padel, praised for previous collections such as Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, turns to her usual themes like travel, love, high culture, and kitchen-table sex, but arguably adds a more mature gloss. Her language is often lush, demotic, allusive, funny, sardonic and fruity. "Imagine we're two bottles of Strozzapieto Di Padone Olive Oil, the pond-green Sluggish stuff, WD40... ('Hey Sugar, Take A Walk On The Wild Side)". But then again she can also be restrained, classical, wry, even limpid: "Look at the bare wood hand-waxed floor and long White dressing-gown, the good child's writing desk And passionate cold feet..." ("Writing To Onegin"). Whichever register Padel is using she is never less than accessible and candid. Some of the best poems, indeed, are when she manages to loom the two voices, the warmly sensuous and the calmly descriptive, into one poetic skein. Try the beginning of Plane Trail for cool yet earthy, refined yet saucy bathos: "The Plane Trail at Cannes... is white ink, writing fishbones on the crazy-paving sky Above this glitter-pink harbour, scribbling over whorls of grey cloud delicate as the stitched and puckered seam Between your balls". Just occasionally Padel loses her footing. The subject matter is eclectic (India, Rio, Sainsbury's poultry, Zacatecan silver mines, Tori Amos) to the point of being unfocused. The verse forms are a bit inchoate; the vocabulary is a tiny bit scattergun. But this is still unquestionably honest, forceful, savvy, cherishable, and very intelligent contemporary poetry.--Sean Thomas