Darwin

Exquisite, precise and moving poems... Once I started reading I could not put it down until I had reached the end, and then I turned back for the pleasure of reading again

Claire Tomalin

A fascinating, very rich book... With sympathy and grace, Padel moves deftly between between science, love and family; between the vast processes of evolution and a personal life

Sean O'Brien

Daring and exciting, brilliant and subtle, stunning and deeply impressive... a lesson to biographers and poets alike

Colm Toibin

Ambitious... shows her extraordinary talent

Observer

Moments of Darwin's life captured with an economy and fluency that prosaic biographers might envy

Spectator

Inspired...her poems are delicate, but with an unusual density... Padel's subtle account is worthy of a fine novelist

The Times

It feels like a deft act of collaboration between the living and the dead, one melding easily with the other... she seems to have caught the quintessence of the man's character, as if in a butterfly net

The Economist

This is not a mere collection, but a complete miniature biography of the great man... Immensely powerful... With her gleaming tropical imagery and a voice resonant with wondrous and tragic overtones, Padel has given us a renewed and intimate Darwin

Richard Holmes, Guardian

They [the poems] convey what a sensitive, wondering, reverent observer Darwin was of life-forms

The Oldie

I love this collection and will happily re-read it several times.What Ruth Padel does so well is to marry her own sharply observed details with the beauty of Darwin's prose...It is a grand story told in poetry that never overlooks the small things.

Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday

a real gem

Selina Cadell, The Times