Ruth Padel was born in London in 1946, the eldest of five siblings, and is a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Her father was a psychoanalyst and classicist who taught his daughter Greek. Ruth studied Greek at Oxford and wrote her Ph.D on ancient Greek poetry. (You can see why I like her already.) She has taught Greek Classics at Oxford, Cambridge, London and Princeton universities and has also studied at the Sorbonne and at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, where she lived for several years. While there, she helped in the excavation of the Royal Palace at Knossos.
As well as teaching Greek Classics, Ruth has written several critical studies on Ancient Greek literature and how its myths can inform an understanding of the modern human psyche. She is also the author of a couple of novels. I can highly recommend 'Daughters of the Labyrinth', a fictional depiction of the holocaust in Crete after the German invasion in WWII.In addition to her affiliation to Greece and all things Greek, Ruth also has a love of music. She has sung as a member of various prestigious chamber choirs in England and France and has has taught opera. Her third consuming interest is in the natural world (as befits her family lineage from Darwin). She is a keen conservationist, a Fellow of the Zoological Society and a Trustee of London Zoo.She was the first woman poet to be nominated for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.All of these consuming passions naturally inform her poetry, of which there are sixteen collections to date. Although in her own words she was "formed by the nineteenth century" in terms of cultural aesthetic and scientific learning, she is a modernist in her writing, and poetry for her is the connective tissue that unites all subjects and disciplines. I find her poetry daring, erudite, imaginative and often downright sexy.
Ruth Padel
I've heard Ruth Padel read a number of times, and if you wish to do so, there are quite a few recordings out on YouTube. I most recently heard her as a guest poet at the Poetry Society's 2025 National Poetry Competition Winners Night, reading from her latest poetry collection, 'Girl'. The other guest poet was Australia's Debbie Lim and she was excellent too. This year's winner, Fiona Larkin, was judged to have submitted the best poem out of 20,000 entries. Them's the odds, folks. I didn't enter. I don't do competitions.Obviously I'm going to share one of Ruth Padel's poems this week rather than one of my own. I've chosen my favorite poem from her 1998 collection 'Rembrandt Would Have Loved You'. That collection also includes the poem with which she won the 1996 National Poetry Competition, Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire, but I much prefer this one. I'll make no commentary. Read and enjoy.
Boulangerie
Still Life With Loaves, Seaweed And Wren Whatever self is, I'd like mine to wake up with yoursWhile sleep is still plumping the skin,Warm bread rising gently in the oven. An enamel oven, opened on a summer morningIn a village in ProvenceBy a woman who's never been unkind, whose childrenAnd husband and lover have never been hurt. It's not that real a place.I do know that. But for this moment of wakingI'm imagining, it holdsThe warmest small patisserie in the world Which does its baking in a sloping village streetBy the wall of the local château.Relations with the château have always been brilliant.There was no need for revolution, there wasn't one. It's all been OK, that side of things.
There are baguettes in the baguette cornerAs there have been two hundred yearsAnd will go on being, for in this village No worlds end. Light pours down the little streetWith all promise of a hot day to comeBut not yet, not yet. A street in which no girlHas been ungenerous to her lover, No child mown down by alcoholic lorries,
No resistance fighter shot. And no Jew shoppedBy neighbours who wanted his farm.The Cathars and the Huguenots were fine. I'm going to reel back history for these bakers,Map them on the road to Eden. Children will come inFor pain au chocolat and get it free.Parents will come For newspapers, milk and a gossip
Which never knifes anyone in the back, not really,And sun will spread through the doorwayWithout alarming the profiteroles, Their glisten of chocolate, that delicate cream.This stove is Delphi, navel of the world,There's you and me in it, and maybe some otherLucky loaves, expanding their crusts For the day to mutter 'We're together, it's OK'.
And if other sorts of loaf, seedcake or sparbunkle,Think it all sounds pretty boring lying there -Loom-weights in a loaf-museum, none of the mica-sparkle Of the scythe - they can fuck off elsewhere.For whatever self is, I'd like mine to wake with yours,Curls mixing on the pillow surprised - as if, seconds before,The separate hairs weren't calcium and follicles But sweeping off on some quite different enterprise
Of being. Maybe hair dreams of being dandelion seedBlown over rivers, gold forests, the motorway du sol.These curls of ours can do that. Let them go helium-ballooning, Linked very lightly, as far as they want.Or maybe they'd like to be seaweedAt the bottom of an East Aegean bay, swaying their tipsIn sky-water whose ripples you can't see, only feel, A virtual reality of movement that gets the weeds excited
Very gently. A pure bit of sea, naturellement,None of your oil slicks and rubbish from foreign yachts.Yes, if the hairs want to have been that, they can, Then be glad to come back to us, as we wakeIn this bakery whose warmth is not electronic but self-made.The loaves created it. They'd like to stay all dayHalf-dreaming they are apples in a loft, radiating Cézanne, Dapple-lit by a window so old it is ouzo,
Quite certain no roof will ever fall. No one visits themExcept a child, who'll remember all her lifeThe smell, the soft still light with dust along its spine, The silent, consenting apples.Yet whatever selves are, I'd like mine to wakeAnd not only dreamWith yours. Be risen loaves, not fixing to get eaten But to get their act together.
Loaves that are going to give themselves namesAnd float out into the worldLooking like people who get phoned up, Arrange meetings and deadlines, difficult lunches.They'll be separate loaves paying their own billsBut all day in their soft loaf partsKeep a patch of themselves away Where they woke up touching -
As a wren, I imagine, keeps the impress of eggsLeft hidden in her penny-size nestWhen she darts out shopping, through the teeth Of hawthorn, for her list of things she needs.Mayfly. Lacewing. And there they stay,Those six-millimetre ovals, pressedIn the faint fawn-feather of her breast. No harm's coming to her eggs,
Nothing broken or planning to break. No need for a wrenTo say sorry, or suffer anything but the warm spark Of morning, dawn-hunts among buds of Russian vine For that greenfly tickle on her tiny wren tongueAnd the mercy of having woken touchingWhat she loves. Whatever love is for a wren.And whatever self is, I'd like yours to wake, If it wouldn't mind, with mine.
Ruth Padel
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