Voodoo Shop

by Ruth Padel

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.

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2002

About the author

Ruth is an English poet and writer. She has published poetry collections, novels, and books of non-fiction, including several on reading poetry. She has presented Radio 4′s Poetry Workshop, visiting poetry groups across the UK to discuss their poems.

Her awards include First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors, an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award and a British Council Darwin Now Research Award for her novel Where the Serpent Lives.

Ruth lives in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Member of the Bombay Natural History Society, an Ambassador for New Networks for Nature, a Patron of 21st-Century Tiger and a Council Member of the Zoological Society of London.

Reviews

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had heard Ruth Padel read at the Edinburgh Book festival and at the Scottish Poetry Library. I always enjoy her readings and really looked forward to at last reading one of her collections cover to cover. She has a keen environmental awareness, yet her poetry never feels like a lecture, in fact is often very sensual. She obviously loves words and knows how to use them to best effect. She is a passionate and engaging performer of her own work, more so than most literary poets - naturally some of this is lost when her poems are read from a book. In fact some of her poems (for example Writing to Onegin) can seem too wordy on the page, whereas her performance makes them into vivid drama. My favourite poem in this collection is CASABLANCA AND THE CHILDREN OF STORM, a long poem about loneliness and the storm petrel, a small seabird. The last part of this poem is haunting:

But somewhere in another galaxy,
Some parallel universe,

We’ll still be what we were.
St Peter’s birds,

Doing the impossible, walking on sea,
The outriders of storm.

Off course maybe; blown,
Fragile, but together. Drawn

To their one and only mate
By magnetism, a cry

You recognise in the dark above all others
And by faith.


It’s a poetry collection I’d recommend, but more, I’d recommend going along to hear Ruth Padel read if you ever get the chance.

[Boxhuman · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a review will come later. This is a first draft so I don't forget anything.

Padel's book is in one word: exotic. Her poems are fast, dizzying, sensual, and dark. When I say "dark" I mean more like, "entering the gypsy woman's tent, smelling the oils from her hands as she blows out the lights" and not "life is a hole that spirals in my soul". The scene is usually changing from poem to poem, but many are about travelling to places outside the comfort-zone, and being half terrified and half amused. She pulls it off, somehow, in a way unique to her.

Following with be some examples:

The unfortunate flaw is that, while her descriptions are raw and ecletic (EXAMPLE), sometimes they fall flat and are too much, too hard, too pushed forward (EXAMPLE). Some poems drag on like this (the last poem unfortunately does) and make it difficult to absorb.

And one little pet peeve, I thought the cover was bad. The picture looks old and doesn't fit the flow of the book. Something darker and more subtle would have been much better.

What I learned: Description, wild and frenzied, can work and I am finding myself more fond of it.

Bottomline: Good, but sometimes too eratic.