Click here to access the poetry recordings of Ruth Padel as well as a brief biography of this author.

Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

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Ruth Padel (b. 1947) has won the National Poetry Competition and written six collections of poetry, several short listed for the T.S. Eliot or Whitbread Prize; taught Greek at Oxford, sung in an Istanbul nightclub, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and a great great grand-daughter of Charles Darwin.

She writes prose as well as poetry. Her poems draw unselfconsciously on an unusual breadth of cultural reference: high and low, humor and gravity, sit in strangely democratic balance in her work. Padel's expressive reading style matches the poems' rich texture.

She provides illuminating introductions to each poem: even, endearingly, mentioning when a factual detail in a poem has turned out to be wrong. Her recording was made on 29 January 2003 at the Audio Workshop in London, and was produced by Richard Carrington. From this page, you can hear the voice of Ruth Padel reading four of her poems: "Mary's Elephant, Elizabeth's Spinet," "Kiss," "Indian Princess Picks Lover Out From Gods" and "Pilot Light."