Moving work … Ruth Padel began her poetry and prose study at the level of cell migration. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
I've just brought out a book about migration, animal and human. Ninety poems interleaved with prose, beginning with cell migration, ending with the migration of souls. It took seven years. I was writing other things meanwhile but this was always on the go, alternating prose and poems because alternation, moving from one place to another, is intrinsic to migration, and anyway I was constantly moving between animals and people in my mind.
There was also a wonderful model of poems-cum-prose to guide me: Dante's book The New Life, which changed European poetry when it appeared in 1295 not only because it mixed prose and verse, but because he wrote it in the vernacular, moving away from Latin.
I wanted the prose because I wanted to make the human issues clear, as well as memorable and resonant. Poetry can give what Robert Frost calls "a fresh look and a fresh listen", but a poem's clarity does not always transmit equally to everyone, and I wanted to make the political point clear – that human migration is part of animal migration, and migration has been part of life on this earth from the start. Life began with migration, and millions of human beings are doing it today as humans always have done. But it's not always voluntary.
Full piece at The Guardian.
There was also a wonderful model of poems-cum-prose to guide me: Dante's book The New Life, which changed European poetry when it appeared in 1295 not only because it mixed prose and verse, but because he wrote it in the vernacular, moving away from Latin.
I wanted the prose because I wanted to make the human issues clear, as well as memorable and resonant. Poetry can give what Robert Frost calls "a fresh look and a fresh listen", but a poem's clarity does not always transmit equally to everyone, and I wanted to make the political point clear – that human migration is part of animal migration, and migration has been part of life on this earth from the start. Life began with migration, and millions of human beings are doing it today as humans always have done. But it's not always voluntary.
Full piece at The Guardian.
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