Girl as individuation, girl as innocence and as becoming. Girl as image of all the vulnerability which men project on the young female figure — and may not want to admit to in themselves.

This collection takes a fresh, questioning look at girlhood and its icons, unravelling millennia of myth woven around girls. At first, in a moving retelling of the Christian story, Mary is a girl in a Primark T-shirt, facing a life shaped by divine will. At the end, a prehistoric ‘Snake Goddess’ is unearthed from the Cretan labyrinth, and reshaped by a male archaeologist.

Between these evocative figures, myth turns personal.  ‘At the magical age of seventy-seven’, the poet looks back in adventurous, delicately crafted lyrics at snapshots of her own life. At her past personas, at her mother and her daughter, and also outwards at mythic archetypes from India, European fairy-tale, ancient Greece and the Urban Dictionary.

Exploring the figure of the girl as soul, as creative energy, as the sacred power of nature, vulnerable but unstoppable, and  ‘listening to the snowmelt / of the patriarchy,’ Girl is an urgent and revelatory work for today.

‘The girl who was told she carried the son of god, the girl who foiled the labyrinth with a ball of thread, the girl who ate an apple or touched the poisoned spindle, the girl who danced in the disco after working all day on an archaeological dig. Warp of memory, weft of inherited story and trope. And the fabric of the whole, as if by special dispensation of the muses, a visitation of light. Those who have long followed and admired the poetry of Ruth Padel, and we are many, know very well how seamlessly she melds the realms of feeling with the realms of thought. What we behold afresh in this beautiful new book is the added magic of “loving a place into sacred.’
— Linda Gregerson, author of Prodigal

“Ruth Padel's new work is a dazzling paean to the many phases of Girl – mother to the woman, mother to the Mother, and mother to the Goddess who ‘waits like a taproot in the deepest layer of the Cretan earth’. It is also a hymn to the catastrophic beauty of life, to the brave human plunge into ‘all that dark involvement without knowing why’. Above all, it is an anthem to innocence, that fragile yet resilient mother of experience and wisdom. Radiant, powerful and deeply moving, these poems celebrate Girl not just as noun, but as ongoing sacred verb.’
— Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of Eating God and Wild Women

‘The female body: what it means for men to look at and women to inhabit. A maze of underground yearnings, where men and women get lost in their different ways, that snakes from Knossos to Kerala via Camden: reflections on the Joys and Sorrows of the Virgin, archaeological fragments controversially ‘completed' in the imaginings of us all. I loved this collection — it touched many things that have moved me in worlds that I thought separate. Ruth Padel, mistress of the labyrinth, invites the reader to follow her into the dark. And to the light beyond.’
— Neil McGregor, author of Living with the Gods

“In these searching, restless poems, Ruth Padel excavates the violence, beauty and danger of girlhood. Formally inventive, and with a dazzling control of the lyric line, Padel uses the poem as time-travelling machine, examining the acts of resistance that connect girls to the women they will become. Just extraordinary.”
— Kim Moore, author of All The Men I Never Married

“Padel taps into that unique and beautiful time where mystery, wonder and mythmaking fold into each other, in exquisite poetry.”
— Mona Arshi