Ruth Padel

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2009

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the poet Ruth Padel. She is a highly acclaimed writer who is fascinated with the natural world around her. She's said of her poetry: "wildness, and wild animals lie at the heart of what I feel about writing". And perhaps that's no surprise - she is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin.

As a child, her hero was Bagheera - the black panther from The Jungle Book. For a time, she confesses, she used to want to be a black panther. Later, she simply wanted to marry one. As an adult she has spent several years travelling across India, Sumatra and parts of Russia tracking tigers and trying to understand their lives. She notes ruefully that while her illustrious ancestor was involved in understanding how different species came into being, her own work was more a matter of documenting their decline.

Her interests have been with her since childhood. Back then, she says, "looking at nature properly, knowing the names of the plants, seeing how the petals worked, observing animal behaviour was just there. That was what you did. That was what being a person was."

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: E Voi Ridete? - And you're laughing? by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: The Iliad by Homer Luxury: A lot of paper and pencils.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast, but this is about something else you might enjoy.
0:05.4	My name's Katie Lecky and I'm an assistant commissioner for on demand music on BBC Sounds.
0:10.7	The BBC has an incredible musical heritage and culture and as a music lover, I love being part of that.
0:17.4	With music on sounds, we offer collections and mixes for everything, from workouts to helping
0:22.7	you nod off, boogie in your kitchen, or even just a moment of calm. And they're all put together
0:28.7	by people who know their stuff. So if you want some expertly curated music in your life,
0:34.9	check out BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
0:41.9	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:45.1	The program was originally broadcast in 2009.
1:07.4	Music My castaway this week is the poet Ruth Pardo.
1:12.2	Critically acclaimed, her poetry brings the natural world into sharp focus,
1:18.4	all the better to describe and document it. If her clear vision and eye for detail sound methodical,
1:24.5	it's little surprise, she comes from a long line of botanists and scientists. Indeed, her great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin. Wildness and wild animals lie at the heart of what I feel
1:30.2	about writing, she says. And of her childhood, looking at nature properly, knowing the names of plants,
1:36.7	seeing how the petals worked, observing animal behaviour, was just there. That was what you did.
1:42.4	That was what being a person was. So Ruth Pardle, on the
1:47.0	origin of poems then for a moment, you yourself have gone, have you not at times to extraordinary
1:52.2	lengths to understand the world and then to make poetry out of it? Tell me about some of the
1:58.0	biggest journeys that you've made. Yes, well, I suppose the biggest one is
2:02.1	the tiger journey. In 2002, I started to go to India and Bhutan and Nepal and Samatra and Laos to find
2:12.3	what was happening to wild tigers. I grew up with scientists, so I'm at ease with scientists and I like
2:18.1	the way they think. And so I went into the forests in the far east of Russia or up volcanoes
	...

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