The Soho Leopard

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 Leopardexplores 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.

Ruth Padelis a prizewinning poet, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological Society of London, and first Resident Writer at Somerset House, London. Her collections includeRembrandt Would Have Loved You,Voodoo ShopandThe Soho Leopard, all shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and more recentlyDarwin: A Life in Poems, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.

Highly acclaimed for her nature writing in a book about conservation,Tigers in Red Weather,and her novel,Where the Serpent Lives, she has also published books on contemporary poetry, including52 Ways of Looking at a PoemandThe Poem and the Journey.

In 2014, Ruth Padel is the first Writer in Residence at Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and is recording her experiences in her blog athttp://www.ruthpadel.com/blog/.