On migration : dangerous journeys and the living world

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"Life began with migration." In a magnificent tapestry of life on the move, Ruth Padel weaves poems and prose, science and religion, wild nature and human history, to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.

"We're all from somewhere else," she begins. "Migration builds civilization but also causes displacement." From the Holy Family's Flight into Egypt, the Lost Colony on Roanoke, and the famous photograph 'Migrant Mother', Padel turns to John James Audubon's journey from Haiti and France, heirlooms carried through Ellis Island, Kennedy's "society of immigrants" and Casa del Migrante on the Mexican border.

But she reaches the human story through the millennia-old journeys of cells in our bodies, trees in the Ice Age, Monarch butterflies travelling from Alaska to Mexico. As warblers battle hurricanes over the Caribbean and wildebeest brave a river filled with the largest crocodiles in Africa, she shows that the truest purpose of migration for both humans and animals is survival.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. xi)
• Ripples on New Grass (p. xv)
• Migration Made the World (p. 1)
• First Cell (p. 10)
• Dance of the Prokaryotes (p. 11)
• Revelation (p. 12)
• Breaking the Bond (p. 14)
• Go and Stay (p. 15)
• Allele (p. 23)
• Cell Begins Her Travels (p. 24)
• Spinning the Plasma (p. 25)
• Flight of the Apple (p. 27)
• Go and Come Back (p. 29)
• Dunlin (p. 42)
• Where Clavicle and Wishbone Fuse (p. 43)
• Children of Storm (p. 44)
• Swallows Hibernating at the Bottom of a River (p. 46)
• Rift (p. 47)
• The Boy from Haiti (p. 48)
• The Watcher (p. 49)
• Finding the Way (p. 51)
• When You're on Your Own (p. 68)
• 1 Osprey (p. 68)
• 2 Hummingbird (p. 69)
• That Bird Migration Records the Movement of Earth's Crust (p. 71)
• Star of the Different Road Back (p. 73)
• Choice (p. 74)
• The Hostile Planet: Sky, Sea, Land (p. 75)
• Nocturne (p. 83)
• The Ampullae of Lorenzini (p. 86)
• Barnacle's Love Song to Humpback Whale (p. 87)
• In Praise of Eight Million Fruit Bats (p. 89)
• The Miracle of the Fish-Counter in Budgens (p. 90)
• Ethogram for a Painted Lady (p. 92)
• Blade Runners of Madagascar (p. 93)
• Road Closed to Save Mating Toads (p. 94)
• Chemical (p. 95)
• There is Always a River (p. 97)
• Song of the Herbivores (p. 105)
• Zebra Go First (p. 106)
• Dream of the Zebra Foal (p. 107)
• Wildebeest Calf (p. 108)
• Vulture Optics (p. 109)
• The Mara, Rising (p. 111)
• How Does a Zebra Decide? (p. 112)
• Pregnant Gazelle (p. 113)
• History's Push and Pull (p. 115)
• The Wild One (p. 128)
• Homo ergaster and the Red Horizon (p. 130)
• Riders from the East (p. 132)
• Leaving Troy (p. 133)
• The Mission (p. 136)
• The Appointment (p. 139)
• Kywash (p. 140)
• Directions for the Plantation of Ulster, 1610 (p. 143)
• The Colossus (p. 144)
• Landscape with Flight into Egypt (p. 145)
• Strangers (p. 147)
• Migrant Mother (p. 161)
• The Letter Home (p. 162)
• What You Told Me about Islands (p. 164)
• 1 The Two Flames (p. 164)
• 2 Blown Ruby (p. 165)
• The Music of Home (p. 166)
• Music from the Deep (p. 169)
• The Two-handled Jug (p. 170)
• The Freud Museum (p. 171)
• Entry of the Sabbath (p. 172)
• Godfearing (p. 173)
• Pieter the Funny One (p. 174)
• Sphinxes on Thames (p. 177)
• The Broken Mirror (p. 179)
• Lodestone (p. 186)
• Gun (p. 187)
• End of the Line (p. 188)
• Sea Catch (p. 190)
• The Mirror of Nature (p. 191)
• Rabbit on the Moon (p. 193)
• The Camden Telescope-Making Class (p. 195)
• Letter to a Portuguese Cosmologist (p. 196)
• Advertisement: The Lunar Registry (p. 198)
• Sharing Space (p. 200)
• Farming the Wind (p. 201)
• The Marshes of Eden (p. 202)
• Children of Storm (p. 205)
• The Desert and the Sea (p. 218)
• Ghost Ship (p. 219)
• Orestiada (p. 220)
• Wetbacks (p. 222)
• Maltese Fishing Boat and Broken Net (p. 223)
• The Place without a Door (p. 225)
• Immigration Counter and the Gates of Ivory (p. 226)
• The Apple Orchard in Ghosts (p. 228)
• The Prayer Labyrinth (p. 229)
• Purple Ink (p. 231)
• Carpet Karaoke (p. 232)
• Dancers with Bruised Knees (p. 234)
• The Wanderings of Psyche (p. 237)
• The Wood Where Birds Die for Christ and Rise Again (p. 246)
• Only Here On Earth (p. 247)
• Matisse Writes a Postcard after the War (p. 248)
• Prayer on an Orphic Gold Leaf (p. 249)
• Open Door: after Rumi (p. 250)
• Time to Fly (p. 251)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In this collection, British conservationist and poet Padel (Tigers in Red Weather), the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, muses on the transient natures of creatures high and low, which she classifies using two types: "Go and Stay," which encompasses both the spread of prehistoric plants from sea to land and the erratic movement of humans; and "Go and Come Back," which includes birds going south for the winter and salmon swimming upstream to spawn. The book is structured as a mixture of poetry and prose, and, as Padel explains, "the prose interludes are not essays but introductions to each run of poems." However, the poems in each set vary in topic to such a degree that the prose introduction, in trying to mirror that variety, ceases to feel like an introduction and instead becomes like a poem of its own. Migrations depicted in the poems include cells replicating courtesy of DNA helicase; fruit bats flying to Congo and pollinating the jungles; and refugees from Cuba floating across the ocean on a raft of chairs. Unfortunately, the prose passages are so lyrical that Padel undercuts the power of her poems, and scientific facts bog down the poetry-especially when those facts appeared previously in the introductions to various sections. The writing is beautiful, but the book often repeats itself. Agent: Robert Kirby, United Agents (London). (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

English poet and nature writer Padel's vision of life is of journeys within journeys. Migration is bred in the genes, and travel takes many clever forms, from the invisible trajectories of parasites and viruses to the astonishingly long flights of birds and butterflies and the covert movements of plants. A descendant of Charles Darwin, Padel deeply internalizes all that she scrutinizes, and she is a migrant, too, journeying within this richly observant and creatively interpretive volume, a thrilling inner journey of discovery, between prose and poetry. Her poems are lucid, supple, and welcoming, her prose is magnetic, and both spark with surprising, stunning revelations. Padel marvels over the daily vertical migration of millions of jellyfish, tracks the wanderings of Audubon, and ponders an exploration gone fatally wrong when a humpback whale ends up in the Thames. Padel herself has traveled the world, from Siberia to Kenya, India, and Greece. Migration is essential to life on earth, she writes, then insightfully considers the impetus for human journeys, from the tragic war, persecution, poverty to the abiding desires for renewal, adventure, and fortune.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A poetic exploration of every aspect of migration, from the evolution of life to the migrations of birds and the patterns of human emigration. Poet and conservationist Padel (Darwin: A Life in Poems, 2009, etc.), the great, great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, connects the relationship of the yearly migrations of birds and butterflies to seasonal human labor and such esoteric subjects as the transmigration of souls. She sets the stage with a poem, "Ripples on New Grass": I want to see autumn swarms of monarch butterfliescalling all migrants home." She follows with a discussion of the distinction between migratory labor and a permanent change of locale. While much of her poetry depends on natural images, her subject matter is wide-ranging--e.g., the contrast between seasonal emigration and forced moves of populations due to "invasion and colonization." In an even greater imaginative leap, Padel compares how human populations are changed by migration to new environments with the original spread of vegetation on the planet, which created our atmosphere. With biting wit, she attacks the shibboleths of nativism by pointing out that the British Royal Oak, an "emblem of England, [is] an immigrant from Spain." Her poems hark back to Noah and the Great Flood and the Trojan War, and she discusses how, in ancient Greece and in the Bible, "[h]elping strangers was an obligation"; she contrasts this to "hundreds of diasporas all over the world." Padel claims that "as birds are the blueprint for migration so are the Jews for diaspora and exile" and then shifts to the biblical account of Joshua leading the Jews to the Promised Land. Padel ends by affirming the role of migration in shaping modern Britain and America. A lyrically effective mix of prose and poetry.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.