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  • Published: 8 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446442777
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96

The Soho Leopard




'I love Ruth Padel's poetry. She is sexy, strong, rhythmic, passionate, fully alive and a whiz with words' - Jeanette Winterson, The Times

Beautiful, disturbing and a pleasure to read, Ruth Padel's new poems are her most ambitious yet, adding animal legend and zoological science to her glitteringly imaginative canvas. With her gift for bringing together experiences and tones of voice that normally stay far apart, she sweeps us from Dulwich Pizza Hut to ancient Siberia, King's Cross to nineteenth-century Burma. We meet Socrates, urban foxes, Louisiana alligators and the endangered Amur leopard in poems resonating with sensuous delight in nature, but also with history and loss.

Finally, a Chinese painter searches for tigers in a forest doomed to the sawmill while the minister who sold it scoffs an aphrodisiac bowl of tiger-penis soup.

Hallucinatory and lyrical, passionately musical, seething with life, The Soho Leopard explores our human need for wildness- and also for stories, wherever we find them. A wonderfully ferocious new collection from one of our most exciting poets.

  • Published: 8 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446442777
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 96

About the author

Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, author of twelve acclaimed poetry collections and prose works including much-loved books on reading contemporary poetry, a travel-memoir on wild tiger conservation, and a study of the influence of Greek myth on rock music. Awards include a British Council Darwin Now Award, a Travel Bursary and Cholmondley Award from The Society of Authors, and First Prize in the National Poetry Competition. She is Professor of Poetry at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Praise for The Soho Leopard

A glittering imaginative riff on a broken relationship

Christina Patterson, Independent

Sensuous... humorous, tender, flamboyant and unforgettable

Carol Rumens, Independent

Visual, sensuous and highly seductive - as if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in

Times Literary Supplement