- Paperback: 70 pages
- Publisher: Chatto & Windus (7 Feb 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0701173017
- ISBN-13: 978-0701173012
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 13.2 x 0.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 401,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
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
Review
The fifth collection of verse from a winner of the National Poetry competition and the best collection yet from a poet with a high media profile whose work is always well reviewed and highly praised.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Glittering language expresses many forms of longing,
By A Customer
This review is from: Voodoo Shop (Chatto poetry) (Paperback)
This is Padel's most ambitious work, at once emotionally subtle, and passionately intense. She has found a shape for her pain : childhood unhappiness, the discovery of mature love, and then the loss of that comfort. The language glitters, and her voice can now be recognised among a chorus of her contemporaries as uniquely her own. Already described as the 'sexiest voice' in contemporary poetry she has risen in this wonderul book to be that rarest of creatures, a poet who can write about the many forms of love.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A joy to read and reread,
By A. Craig "Amanda Craig" (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Voodoo Shop (Chatto poetry) (Paperback)
Ruth Padel is the real thing - a poet who makes the particular universal, who writes about what falling in love and losing that love can do. Her language is so wonderfully flexible and rich that she encompasses comedy and sadness, anger and resignation. Some of my favourite poems were not about love, but evocations of place that become (as in Surf Rage at Bonid Beach) metaphors for the poet's search for truth.
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