Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Monday, 25 October 2004

"The Soho Leopard" by Ruth Padel (Chatto & Windus, 2004)

Wow - over 6 pages of notes! And yet sometimes she still spells things out in the poetry - "Of Lord Darth Vadar from Star Wars". Line-breaks and indents continue to puzzle me - why does p.41 have any line-breaks? I had genre problems with p.47, p.48, p.52, etc - with only a little editing they could be prose BBC Nature reportage. There's a barrage of imagery - the first poem begins "Water, moonlight, danger, dream." and other poems slide-show one image after another, images drawn from many cultures and eras. When it works it's bracing. The "The King's Cross Foxes" section didn't work for me, but much of the rest was a worthwhile read - content-wise if nothing else.

No comments:

Post a Comment