Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth

by Ruth Padel

Timely, topical and a collection of poems about the Middle East, and Ruth Padel's first full poetry collection for ten years.
     Through images of craft and conflict, and the ways in which human beings turn to making things as a way through crisis, these poems trace a quest for harmony in the midst of destruction. 
     An ancient synagogue survives two arson attacks. An 'oud, the core instrument of Middle Eastern music, is made and broken. A Palestinian boy in a West Bank refugee camp learns to dance and a Polish Jew in a Nazi camp carves a chain from a broom-handle. A guide shows us round Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity during a siege.
     What unites this book is the common ground shared by the world's core Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and a sense of human experience as pilgrimage and vulnerability, persecution and incarceration, but also as music, pattern and form. Its moving final vision is one of restoration and regeneration, and Ruth Padel shows us, with care and empathy, how the complexities of conflict in the Holy Land speak to the heart of human "Wherever we're looking from / we are this Middle East. Some chasm / through the centre must be in and of us all".

Genres: Poetry, Religion

80 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2014

About the author

Ruth is an English poet and writer. She has published poetry collections, novels, and books of non-fiction, including several on reading poetry. She has presented Radio 4′s Poetry Workshop, visiting poetry groups across the UK to discuss their poems.

Her awards include First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors, an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award and a British Council Darwin Now Research Award for her novel Where the Serpent Lives.

Ruth lives in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Member of the Bombay Natural History Society, an Ambassador for New Networks for Nature, a Patron of 21st-Century Tiger and a Council Member of the Zoological Society of London.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Making is our defence against the dark.” The overarching themes of this collection are war and the Holy Land, both historic and contemporary. The two strands overlap more often than not, and the language is full of biblical echoes and/or direct quotes. “Seven Words and an Earthquake,” for instance, recounts the Crucifixion; Part 1, “Forgiveness,” goes into gory detail. As always, Padel writes beautifully about nature, and many of her ending lines are as abrupt and sobering as slaps in the face. If I have one criticism about the book in general, it’s that it’s not particularly subtle, but then, when the subject matter is this important, who cares?

Favorite lines:

“The past is not where you left it. Every choice / is loss.” (from “The Wanderer”)

“Landscape / is your life seen in distance, when you know // for just an interval of sunlight / how to join time travelled with time still to go.” (from “Landscape with Flight into Egypt”)

“We are out in the wilderness now. Behind / is the word for Egypt. Narrow, constrained – / but an easy life. Do you want to go back?” (from “The Hebrew for Egypt Means Narrow”)

“How we need each other, crossing this desert / of life” (from “Extract from the Travels of Ibn Jubayr”)

“Where every elixir is wrong / you hold to what you know.” (from “Birds on the Western Front” – inspired by H. H. “Saki” Munro)

“Every crossing is a pilgrimage. The hard thing / is to pass; harder still to fold those wings / and drop the mask. Just do it.” (from “Speak of Distance”)

[Emma Filtness · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting poetic exploration of the middle East. I found the poet's intentional use of anachronisms intriguing - describing historical events and places by using similes drawing upon air conditioning units and the like. This collection renders the beauty of its location, captures the gaudy tackiness of religious tourism and unflinchingly presents violence and loss. Along with a dusty pink beauty and a deep, tumultuous history, I came away from this text with an admiration for a place with such an impressive resillience.

I got the feeling a certain amount of prior knowledge was expected when reading this, which could make the poems feel inaccessible to some readers.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are stunning works of evocation and excavation, weaving together echoes from literature, scripture, art, poetry and history to create a kind of monument of, primarily the Middle East, although one of the most affecting poems is instead about Saki in the trenches of the First World War. The centerpiece is a towering achievement of empathy and that same weaving of so many elements, a sequence of poems to go with Haydn's string quartets on the seven last utterances of Jesus. The brief Notes in the end contributed a lot to understanding contexts, but try to read and feel the poems without them the first time.

[Cooch · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is some good poetry here

For me, sometimes Padel's personal and individual notions and understandings fail to adequately translate into poetry which can be fully felt by the reader. However, there are some excellent moments and some fully effective poems here too.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

KOBOBOOKS

Reviewed by The Independent (26 Jun 2014), The Guardian (6 Jul 2014)

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Padel has set herself an enormous task -- to write about conflict in the middle east over the centuries, and to write about it from Christian, Muslim and Jewish perspectives. this is a lot to handle in one slim collection, and she achieves her aims admirably. there are certainly poems that fall short of the mark -- her sequence written for the Seven Last Words of Christ feels cold and limited in scope to me, despite the beautiful language -- but there are many times when her poems feel both amazingly broad in their ideas and wonderfully particular and personal at the same time.

[bermudianabroad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't grab me. A real shame because I really wanted it to grab me. A hand full of stand out poems. Particularly liked Forgiveness, but nothing else touched me in the same way.

[Michael Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly beautiful. Magical and thought-provoking. Left me hungry for more!

[Anton · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful