Voodoo Shop

Voodoo Shop begins with a love letter from the innocent Tatyana to the sophisticated Eugene Onegin and ends with a haunting meditation on departure and migration. In the intervening poems, Ruth Padel takes her reader on a series of spectacular journeys across the world and into the complex landscape of an intense love affair. Renowned for the dazzling scope of her imagination, and for her linguistic and formal adventurousness, Padel reveals herself to be at the height of her powers in this collection. The poems are wonderfully different, shifting from witty exuberance to quiet restraint in the blink of an eye, leaping from Ireland to Brazil as the page turns. One minute they are in sumptuous technicolour, the next minute in black and white. They are grand poems addressed to a large audience and crowded with other people - Tori Amos and Bridget Riley make an appearance - and yet they are also starkly intimate: the solitary voice of a woman opening her heart to a man. This is a collection about separation and unity, the search for forms of faith in the face of confusion, for a personal voodoo. In their structure and ordering the poems reflect their themes: like the tesserae of a mosaic, their shimmering diversity makes perfect sense when viewed together.