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Ruth Padel

The Mara Crossing Hardcover – 5 Jan. 2012

by Ruth Padel (Author)

4.5 16 ratings

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Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain?

In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel's original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.

'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa.

Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival.

Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Chatto & Windus
Publication date

5 Jan. 2012
Dimensions

14.27 x 2.21 x 21.59 cm
ISBN-10

9780701185558
ISBN-13

978-0701185558
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Product description

Review

"A vertiginous compendium, a prodigy, a book of wonders: it is Montaigne’s and Darwin’s 21st-century child" (Independent)

"A broad-ranging meditation on all things migratory...This is a book of raw interfaces and unnerving encounters. Magnificent poems... a triumph of imagistic ingenuity" (Guardian)

"(A) thoughtful and often quite magical mix of prose and poetry…What is just as fascinating as Padel’s central theme is the insight that she also gives us into poetry, or rather, into the creation of a poem." (Lesley McDowell Independent on Sunday)

"The Mara Crossing is a major meditation on migration. The prose is crystalline, the poems full of the wonderful material stuff of life. It's a poet's book to the core, a passionate exploration of her subject, proving that pressures on cells, bodies, creatures (human and other), and on the planet itself, are fit and essential matter for poetry" (Jo Shapcott)

"A glorious fabric, weaving lyricism and hard facts, poetic insight and scientific detail unwinding from the multitudinous threads of geographical migration. A beautiful, far-ranging book about physical journeys and all they might mean to humans and animals alike" (Mark Cocker)

About the Author

Ruth Padel is a prizewinning poet, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological Society of London, and first Resident Writer at Somerset House, London. Her collections include Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, all shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and more recently Darwin: A Life in Poems, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. Highly acclaimed for her nature writing in a book about conservation, Tigers in Red Weather, and her novel, Where the Serpent Lives, she has also published books on contemporary poetry, including 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. In 2014, Ruth Padel is the first Writer in Residence at Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and is recording her experiences in her blog at http://www.ruthpadel.com/blog/.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0701185554
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Chatto & Windus; First Edition (5 Jan. 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780701185558
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0701185558
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.27 x 2.21 x 21.59 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 917,058 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 2,590 in Criticism on Poetry & Poets

Customer reviews:
4.5 16 ratings

About the author

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Ruth Padel

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Ruth's new book is DAUGHTERS OF THE LABYRINTH. a novel set on Crete where she has lived on and off most of her life. The book took ten years to write, and has that complex beautiful island at its heart, but also questions of identity, mothers and daughters, family secrets, and the lost Jews of Crete

'Animated by keen imaginative empathy and a strong sense of place a moving, satisfying, layered novel on questions of identitt and complexities of family' (Daily Mail).

‘A moving and superbly written exploration of a family with dark secrets. Crete itself becomes one of the main characters in the story.’ (Irish Times, Best Books, Summer Reading 2021)

Ruth is an award-winning poet, Professor of Poetry at King's College London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her twelve collections include a collection on Beethoven's life and music: 'Beethoven Is more Intimate than ever in these new poems: she tells the great composer’s life story more profoundly than most biographies,' (New York Times).

She has also written on wild tigers, TIGERS IN RED WEATHER, exploring Asian forests with naturalists and scientists - whom she wrote about in her first novel set in India, WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES,

She teaches poetry in King's College London, where she runs a series of talks called POETRY AND - , exploring poetry's connections to all areas of life: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/06/ruth-padel-poetry-connection-readings

Website www.ruthpadel.com. Twitter @ruthpadel, Instagram ruth_padel

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4.5 out of 5

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Naomi

Hauntingly beautiful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 28 November 2012

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I had to restrain myself from reading too much in one go, so I could digest each chapter and make the experience last longer. It is indeed a flowing, fact filled meditation on so many aspects of migration from cells to insects, birds, marine and land animals, as well as people. One tiny example I hadn't known, is of the daily vertical migration of jellyfish from the deep ocean to the surface. It spans ancient to contemporary history including stark tales of today's immigration issues and the treatment of those seeking a 'better life'. It describes the many reasons for migration as well as the means. How Ruth Padel does this in such concise yet eloquent language makes it a masterpiece. Her knowledge of biology, and the different examples she uses could fill a dissertation. I learned so much and my imagination took flight. I found her prose as lyrical as her poetry. Each chapter ends with several poems on the theme of that chapter. Her final poem 'Time to Fly' is a moving summary of the drive to migrate. I have now bought several copies to give as gifts.

3 people found this helpful

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Constantine

An astonishing work

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 29 November 2012

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I can't put this down. Ruth Padel writes what starts as a personal journal, looking out onto her beloved garden and observing the birds. She then takes you on an extraordinary journey as if you were migrating with the birds, explaining in detail the reasons, biological, practical and genetic, for their behaviour; all in accessible fascinating language. It does not end there - she considers the very nature of animal migration (including human) and how this has determined the world in which we live. Ruth Padel is a renowned poet, a master, and the added joy of this book is in the poems which are interwoven with the prose. A group of poems follows on from the text in such a way that you have an additional understanding of the poems, which refer to what she has so lucidly described about migration.

4 people found this helpful

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Speechgirl

Great poetry and meditative book though I was disappointed there ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 4 November 2014

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Great poetry and meditative book though I was disappointed there was not more artwork as I picked it off a website to this purpose.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 14 November 2013

Verified Purchase

A must have, the book is brilliantly written. I thought it would only be poems, but each chapter is explained very well and then the poems follow. I LOVE IT. I haven't enjoyed poetry this much in a long time.

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BioDiplomacy

"Migration Made The World"

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 14 February 2012

The Mara Crossing is where the wildebeest reach the last stage of their migration from Kenya to Tanzania, the dangerous mass swim across the Mara river. This becomes a central image for this "major meditation on migration" (Jo Shapcott) . I can't think what to call the genre that houses this unusual mixture of prose - often poetic - and poems which often pluck words from biological texts:

... Protozoa, copepods
and krill, a ragtag army
preyed on by larger predators still -
the bioluminescence brigade:
lantern-fish glowing cold
catoptromantic rays,
three hundred species
of dense packed cephalopods;
and hatchet-fish
following their own fixed upward gaze.
(from "Nocturne", alliteration and rhythm helping fit the words for their new home.)

At times the structure has similarities with a post-Wagnerian opera, rich arias and recitative, plotless (like Glass's "Satyagraha") but with compulsive leitmotifs. The prose passages are built on inductive logic rather than tightly argued syllogisms. They are the bright pickings that sparkle in a jackdaw's nest, the fruits of such extensive reading that one almost feels there should be a bibliography. The Haitian-born Audubon's first banding of birds in America throws the mist net of migration over birds and humans; and Lowenstein, another migrant, discovers as late as 1961 that living organisms contain the mineral magnetite in their bodies, allowing some to use Earth's magnetic field to guide their movements.

The overall theme is that "Home and migration belong together, two sides of the same ancient coin. Home is something we make, then things change, either in ourselves or in the world, we lose home and have to go elsewhere." This is the plotline of many stories and myths as well as of our home planet's biological and ecological history, from Ulysses to the forced exile of the Chagossians from their islands so that US bombers can flourish as an alien invasive species that easily pushes out the defenceless natives. That example is not in the book, but shows the power of migration to provide illustrative analogies for many human predicaments.

In one way this review is provisional. This book will reward re-readings, as a first one makes clear. Praise too for the fine cover and binding: physically it is a pleasure to carry and read, ideally when on a journey.

13 people found this helpful

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The Mara Crossing Hardcover – 5 Jan. 2012

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