{"id":692,"date":"2009-09-01T20:53:10","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T00:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=692"},"modified":"2009-09-01T20:53:10","modified_gmt":"2009-09-02T00:53:10","slug":"darwin-a-life-in-poems-by-ruth-padelalfred-a-knopf-borzoi-2009-originally-chatto-windus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/darwin-a-life-in-poems-by-ruth-padelalfred-a-knopf-borzoi-2009-originally-chatto-windus\/","title":{"rendered":"Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth PadelAlfred A. Knopf (Borzoi), 2009 (Originally Chatto & Windus)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This book is full<\/em>, 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”<\/a>, the dark streets and slip-passages in “The Efficacy of Prayer”<\/a>, the rooms in Christ’s College, Cambridge, as described in the first part of “The Coddington Microscope”<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The poems in the second section of the book, about Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle<\/em>, 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”<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>, the excitement of Darwin’s thought—the way he worked through what he saw and learned on the Beagle<\/em> voyage—excellent, often, but none of it quite matches the second section for delight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}