Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth

Padel, Ruth

ISBN 10: 0701188162 / ISBN 13: 9780701188160

Published by Chatto & Windus, 2014

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Seller Inventory # rev7109892270

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth
• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701188162
• ISBN 13: 9780701188160
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 90 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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".

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.