Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth - Softcover

Padel, Ruth

3.89

19 ratings by Goodreads

9780701188160: Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701188162 ISBN 13: 9780701188160

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2014

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Timely, topical and necessary: a collection of poems about the Middle East, and Ruth Padel's first full poetry collection for ten years.
     Through images of craft and conflict, and the ways in which human beings turn to making things as a way through crisis, these poems trace a quest for harmony in the midst of destruction.
     An ancient synagogue survives two arson attacks. An 'oud, the core instrument of Middle Eastern music, is made and broken. A Palestinian boy in a West Bank refugee camp learns to dance and a Polish Jew in a Nazi camp carves a chain from a broom-handle. A guide shows us round Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity during a siege.
     What unites this book is the common ground shared by the world's core religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and a sense of human experience as pilgrimage and vulnerability, persecution and incarceration, but also as music, pattern and form. Its moving final vision is one of restoration and regeneration, and Ruth Padel shows us, with care and empathy, how the complexities of conflict in the Holy Land speak to the heart of human experience: "Wherever we're looking from / we are this Middle East. Some chasm / through the centre must be in and of us all".

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

RUTH PADEL is a prize-winning poet, author and classicist. Her eight poetry collections, all shortlisted for major prizes, include Darwin, an internationally praised lyric biography of her ancestor Charles Darwin, and Mara Crossing, a study of human and animal migration. Her prose works include her journeys exploring wild tiger conservation in Asia, a novel on wildlife crime, and much-loved books on reading poetry. She broadcasts for Radio 3 and Radio 4 on poetry, music, literature and wildlife, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Council Member of the Zoological Society of London, and Teaching Fellow in Poetry at Kings College London. She lives in London.

Review:

"There are points where one feels Padel is a poetic Daniel Barenboim. It is inlaid poetry... as if Padel were embroidering a tapestry. Each poem turns out to be an instrument and Padel knows how to play. Her command of register is masterly... There is no doubting Padel's accomplishment, her poems stand tall partly because she tends to rise about the personal." -- Kate Kellaway * Observer * "Padel is one of our most talented writers. She turns her multi-layered poetic attention to the Middle East, seeking peace and harmony through sensitive and moving poems that offer hope even as they reflect upon struggle." -- Bel Mooney * Daily Mail * "Lyrical and sensual, albeit with a keen awareness that in war zones, music, love and poetry are sidelined even as they become more vital. Padel skilfully juxtaposes the modern world with the ancient." -- Suzi Feay * Independent on Sunday * "Padel's great characteristic is her range. Making an Oud interweaves contemporary Middle Eastern politics, the history and culture of the Abrahamic religions, natural beauty and love poetry. Padel is not writing partisan polemic but attempting something much more difficult, a kind of cultural synthesis." * Independent * "Superb collection... Sorrowful and elegiac...though it ends on a note not entirely without hope" -- Lesley Mcdowell * Glasgow Sunday Herald *

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.