Emerald

Ruth Padel's story, of a daughter's love for her mother, allows her to reach for a movingly selfless language of human relations. She brings back never-before-seen jewels from those places where the mind goes to take refuge from grief

Hugo Williams

Emerald is a book of a wild and generous imagination from a writer at the peak of her powers. It offers up a rich excavation of the truths and mysteries found in grief – and should be of interest to any reader concerned with the limitations and beauty of the human condition. Padel has created a collection that is very much alive with uniquely restless, questioning intensity

Sarah Westcott, Poetry School

If Ruth Padel is one our national treasures – and she most certainly is – then her latest book of poems will surely rank as one of her greatest achievements to date... lyrical reflections on the human condition... an intensely beautiful portrait of final farewells... Padel has made great art out of her ingenious – and utterly satisfying – blending of lyric memoir, natural history, and travel writing, defying the limitations poets all too often place on themselves... Everyone should read Emerald, it's as valuable as the title implies

André Naffis-Sahely, Ambit

Padel capture(s) small details with a lightness and freshness which has genuine staying power. Her skill at selecting the telling visual moment implies how a good parent may extend and deepen their child’s understanding of the world. It also enacts its own process of hidden things becoming visible, part of the labour of emerald mining and cutting that Padel explores to illustrate her passage into healing

Alice Hiller, The Poetry Review

Emerald’s themes are broad as well as attentive to the intimate. Padel writes with an acute awareness that the mundane can gesture towards the profound

Carla-Rosa Manfredino, Times Literary Supplement

A profoundly moving, complex, glittering elegy for her brilliant mother

Bel Mooney, Daily Mail