Voodoo Shop (Chatto poetry) [Paperback]

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

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.

Passionate flights of fancy are touched by myth and dream...sweaty desires, anger and laughter inhabit the here and now.

Displays a gift for modulating from easy conversational to a more richly textured singing line with no sense of dislocation.

"The poems all but slink down the page, demanding to be read aloud. The glamour recalls Sex and the City: this alone would make her voice an original one."

"A vibrant collection, visual, sensuous... lush and bold, exotic as well as erotic."

"Magnificently varied, daring and imaginative, and never short of glittering humour. A very sexy book, fabulously rich."

Voodoo Shop begins with a love letter from the innocent Tatyana to the sophisticated Eugene Onegin and ends with a haunting meditation on departure and migration. In the intervening poems, Ruth Padel takes her reader on a series of spectacular journeys across the world and into the complex landscape of an intense love affair. Renowned for the dazzling scope of her imagination, and for her linguistic and formal adventurousness, Padel reveals herself to be at the height of her powers in this collection. The poems are wonderfully different, shifting from witty exuberance to quiet restraint in the blink of an eye, leaping from Ireland to Brazil as the page turns. One minute they are in sumptuous technicolour, the next minute in black and white. They are grand poems addressed to a large audience and crowded with other people - Tori Amos and Bridget Riley make an appearance - and yet they are also starkly intimate: the solitary voice of a woman opening her heart to a man. This is a collection about separation and unity, the search for forms of faith in the face of confusion, for a personal voodoo. In their structure and ordering the poems reflect their themes: like the tesserae of a mosaic, their shimmering diversity makes perfect sense when viewed together.