Darwin: A Life in Poems, Ruth Padel

Darwin: A Life in Poems is an interesting endeavour, though it doesn’t quite work for me. Bits of Darwin’s words, descriptions of his life, little details — it makes for an interesting collection for its own sake, but the poetry mostly doesn’t read right. Some of the detail plucked from Darwin’s letters and work is interesting, some bits of it work startlingly well, but as a whole, it’s not a project that works for me.

A sort-of similar project making music around Darwin’s life worked much better for me — Karine Polwart’s song can bring tears to my eyes in the right mood. The Darwin Song Project is worth checking out, though their site now seems to be defunct. You can at least find Karine’s song on youtube.

Rating: 2/5

The Antigone Poems, Marie Slaight, Terrence Tasker

I originally entered the LibraryThing Early Reviewers draw for this and didn’t get it, so when I spotted it on Netgalley I picked it up right away. Antigone is a figure who always fascinated me: her burning passion for her duty, her righteousness, her tragedy… but also the sense that this was a sort of teenage rebellion against authority; the worry that she was acting more for her own sake, to be a symbol, than for her brothers.

This collection of art and poetry was apparently originally created in the 70s. I’m no particular judge of art (but I know what I like, as people say), and the art didn’t really appeal to me. The poetry felt fragmentary, hard to connect with the figure of Antigone at times and then at other times perfectly clear. There are some bright, sharp images that I really liked; at other times I was ambivalent.