Girl

by Ruth Padel

A new collection from one of our most distinguished poets, painting a portrait in verse of two iconic female figures poised between history and legend, and unravelling the millennia of myth men have woven around them to explore the notion of girlhood itself.

Genres: Poetry

114 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 7, 2024

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

[LiLi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really beautiful poetry collection exploring girlhood and womanhood, their similarities, differences and complexities. Also some powerful perspectives on motherhood.

Some of my favourite lines:
‘That moment when you realise
your child belongs to the world
not to you. Never did belong to you anyway.

Belong is not the word
your child belongs with himself.’

‘We think we can keep ourselves apart from the flames
but they're everywhere
every hour inside us again and then again’

‘cloudy
proof of girls
I have been
maybe still am’

‘Listening to the snowmelt
of the patriarchy but reckoning the scars
left by its ten-thousand-tentacle
reach into our minds Eve and the Virgin

purity and sin and the rest
which we have laughed about you and I
but mourned all our lives
and the violence is still’

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Padel is one of my favourite poets and a repeat appearance on my summer reading list. I’ve read 12 of her books now. This collection is about girlhood, by way of personal history and myth. The first section, “When the Angel Comes for You,” is about the Virgin Mary, its 15 poems corresponding to the 15 Mysteries of the Rosary (as Padel explains in a note at the end; had she not, that would have gone over my head). The opening poem about the Annunciation is the most memorable its contemporary imagery emphasizing Mary’s youth and naivete: “a flood of real fear / and your heart / in the cowl-neck T-shirt from Primark / suddenly convulsed. But your old life // now seems dry as a stubbed / cigarette.” The third section, “Lady of the Labyrinth,” is about Ariadne, inspired by the snake goddess figurines in a museum on Crete. The message here is the same: “there is always the question of power / and girl is a trajectory / of learning how to deal with it”.

But the only poems that truly stood out to me are in the central autobiographical section arising from Padel’s own girlhood as well as her observations of her daughter and grandchild (setting up a Maiden–Mother–Crone triad). “Girl in a Forest” and “Tomboy and Panther” draw on the lure of the jungle to depict a wild child who chooses trousers over skirts. I loved “Fair Verona” for its traveler’s nostalgia but also for the hint of menace: so many tourists fondled the breast on a statue of Juliet that it had to be replaced. “How much touching // does it take for a bronze breast to crack?” the poet asks.

There’s some good alliteration throughout, and I warmed to the vision of girlhood as a time of promise and possibility: “the wonder / the where shall I go what new thing / will this day bring of being a girl.” Overall, though, I didn’t think the book had a lot of substance to convey about its theme.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s funny because this one took time to catch my interest where the first half didn’t seem to connect the second drew more on myths and history through a female perspective which was absolutely stunning!

[Anna Sinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up

I enjoyed the first two sections, “When the Angel Comes for You” and “Under the Flesh and Dream of Who You Are is the Truth of Who You Are”. I found the last section “Lady of the Labyrinth” weaker.

[Mae Vedel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Je n'ai pas aimé l'aspect mystique et mythologique