New book from Hazel Press: 'Watershed' by Ruth Padel
Hear Ruth Padel in reading and conversation with Sean Borodale tomorrow, Thursday 16 March, at the London Review Bookshop
As countries are engulfed by floods and rising seas, Ruth Padel’s new collection of poems, Watershed, celebrates the numinous power of water while exploring the depths of our capacity to deny the climate crisis.
What lurks in the underwater caverns of our unconscious to give denial such potency? Padel considers “the nightmare of a psyche so dry it is resistant to rain / the water falls straight through / like a love you never noticed.” Yet there’s always the sparkle of hope, summed up by a lamp created out of saltwater by an indigenous community to light their night fishing.
Philosophy, psychology, myth, laughter and pain, Watershed is a celebration of fluidity, illuminating the mystery of water in its unceasing flex and flow.
Padel will be joined in reading and conversation at the LRB Bookshop tomorrow evening at 7pm by fellow Hazel poet Sean Borodale, whose latest pamphlet is Re-Dreaming Sylvia Plath as a Queen Bee.
We’d love to see you at the launch, but if you can’t make it, copies of Watershed are now on sale on our website.
About the author:
Ruth Padel is a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer, known for her poetic explorations of migration and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece.