Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth PadelAlfred A. Knopf (Borzoi), 2009 (Originally Chatto & Windus)

This book is full, pleasingly so: marginal notes alongside the text, the poems themselves full of quotes from letters and memoirs, both Darwin’s and those of his friends and family. (Padel herself is Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter.) I like the places in this book, the sense of place, whether city or country—the description of Darwin’s father’s estate in “The Miser”, the dark streets and slip-passages in “The Efficacy of Prayer”, the rooms in Christ’s College, Cambridge, as described in the first part of “The Coddington Microscope”.

The poems in the second section of the book, about Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, are wonderfully full of nature, of the tropics, of the sea: “The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets,” a poem called “Plankton” starts, and there’s Darwin, over his bout of seasickness, studying plankton and pteropods. A page later he’s on land, and full of wonder: “Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes” captures so much enthusiasm, so much interest. A page after that and he’s in the tropical forest, the “churchy breathing dark” of it, the suddenness of rain, all the new plants: “Leaves of all textures that a leaf/could be: palm, fluff, prickle, matte and plume;/bobbled, shaggy plush. A thousand shades/of ochre, silver, emerald, smoky brass” (pp 32-33). I think this section’s my favorite, the sheer exuberance of it.

Later, there’s London: smog, soot, noise, “the river’s cindery flush/whipped to meringue by the wind” (p 51), chimpanzees at the zoo, a great/funny poem based on Darwin’s famous list of the pros and cons of marriage, the excitement of Darwin’s thought—the way he worked through what he saw and learned on the Beagle voyage—excellent, often, but none of it quite matches the second section for delight.