“Lean and warm and funny and beautifully written…A mad, compressed biography, in a luminous, fertile poetry, of a once-in-centuries genius.” -Luke Davies
“Vivid, musical, sensuous and strong”-Adam Thorpe
“These rich, wry poems bring us extraordinarily close to Darwin’s life and mind.” -Dame Gillian Beer, Author of Darwin’s Plots
“A tidal imagination”-Matthew Hollis
To lose your mother at the age of eight. To spend five years at sea, circumnavigating the globe, unsure whether you will ever return home. To watch your favourite daughter die and almost never speak her name again. To survive years of incurable illness and crippling stomach pains. To live with the fear that the knowledge inside you could wreck your marriage and destroy all that your society holds dear. To have twenty years of work nearly eclipsed by a younger man.
To create a new kind of faith that will change the world.
In 1832, Charles Darwin, a twenty-two year old naturalist and beetle-collector was offered a place on board a ship called the Beagle. Thinking him already idle and good-for-nothing, his father initially said ‘a waste of time’.
This was a young Darwin, a highly sensitive man who loved Paradise Lost and Wordsworth’s Preludes; keenly aware that geological forces of time were ‘truly poetical’, carrying a flower painter’s colour samples around with him so that he might better describe his own collections; a man in love with the mysteries of the world, who believed that science and poetry were, after all, but a series of philosophical riddles to solve.
Emily Ballou’s beautifully imagined verse-portrait of Charles Darwin’s life saves the man from the legend, bringing to light a fragile and deeply-felt humanity, capturing the textures of his work and dreams, the noise and touch of his wife and children, his inner doubts and questions. It is the story of a man at the brink of a revolutionary theory; a man whose dogged, lifelong determination to pursue the truth, despite the cost to his health, never undermined his intense feelings of devotion to those he loved.
The Darwin Poems by Emily Ballou. The University of Western Australia Press, April 2009 (www.uwapress.uwa.edu.au)