Shifting between vulnerability and guilt, innocence and doubt, tenderness and frustration, teasing reproach and the exaltation of deep love and sexual happiness, this book explores the complexity of emotions that go with falling in love. It includes the poem that won the 1996 National Poetry Competition 'Icicles round a tree in Dumfriesshire'.

Suitable for those who want to write as well as read poems, this book reveals the journey of thought, language and music within sixty more poems and also shows how poems fortify us on the journey of our lives, in a collection of essays written in elegant, accessible prose.

In this sequence of poems using multiple viewpoints, Ruth Padel follows not only the development of the great scientist's professional thought, and the drama of the discovery of evolution, but also imagines the fluctuating emotions within Darwin, the private man and tender father.

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 religions:...