Description

A fresh and questioning look at girlhood and its icons, unravelling the millennia of myth woven around girls.

‘A sensual exploration of two female archetypes’ Guardian
‘One of our most gifted poets … This is tender and exquisite poetry’ Mona Arshi, author of Small Hands

In Girl, Ruth Padel presents a triptych of interlocking sequences. A moving retelling of the Christian story transforms the Virgin Mary into a girl in a Primark T-shirt, facing a life shaped by divine will. Unearthed from the Cretan labyrinth, a prehistoric Snake Goddess is reshaped at the hands of a male archaeologist.

Between these evocative figures, myth turns personal. Delicately crafted lyrics, sometimes taking adventurous shapes, explore snapshots from the poet’s own life blended with archetypes from India, European fairy tale, ancient Greece and Urban Dictionary: girl as soul, girl as creative energy, girl as the sacred power of nature, vulnerable but unstoppable. ‘Listening to the snowmelt / of the patriarchy’, Girl is an urgent, revelatory work for today.

**A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation**

‘Dazzling’ Kim Moore, author of All the Men I Never Married
‘Beautiful’ Linda Gregerson, author of The Selvedge

Publisher Review

‘One of our most gifted poets turns her gaze to the terrain of girlhood: Padel taps into that unique and beautiful time where all the mystery, wonder and mythmaking fold into each other. This is tender and exquisite poetry’ * Mona Arshi, author of Small Hands * ‘In these searching, restless poems, Ruth Padel excavates the violence, beauty and danger of girlhood, asking again and again “Who makes you girl? When does it stop?” Formally inventive and with a dazzling control of the lyric line, Padel uses the poem as time travelling machine, examining the acts of resistance that connect girls to the women they will become’ * Kim Moore, author of All the Men I Never Married * ‘This collection touched many things that have moved me in worlds I thought separate. The female body: what it means for men to look at, and women to inhabit, that maze of underground yearnings that snakes from Knossos to Kerala via Camden. Ruth Padel, Mistress of the Labyrinth, invites the reader to follow her into the dark. And to the light beyond’ * Neil MacGregor, author of Living with the Gods * ‘Ruth Padel’s new work is a dazzling paean to the many phases of Girl – mother to the woman, mother to the Mother, and mother to the Goddess who ‘waits like a taproot in the deepest layer of the Cretan earth’. It is also a hymn to the catastrophic beauty of life, to the brave human plunge into ‘all that dark involvement without knowing why’. Above all, it is an anthem to innocence, that fragile yet resilient mother of experience and wisdom. Radiant, powerful and deeply moving, these poems celebrate Girl not just as noun, but as ongoing sacred verb’ * Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of Wild Women * ‘The girl who was told she carried the son of God, the girl who foiled the labyrinth with a ball of thread, the girl who ate an apple or touched the poisoned spindle, the girl who danced in the discotheque after working all day on an archaeological dig. Warp of memory, weft of inherited story and trope. And the fabric of the whole, as if by special dispensation of the muses, a visitation of light. Those who have long followed and admired the poetry of Ruth Padel, and we are many, know very well how seamlessly she melds the realms of feeling with the realms of thought. What we behold afresh in this beautiful new book is the added magic of “loving a place into sacred” ‘ * Linda Gregerson, author of The Selvedge *