As countries are engulfed by floods and rising seas, Ruth Padel’s new collection of poems, Watershed, celebrates the numinous power of water while exploring the depths of our capacity to deny the climate crisis.

What lurks in the underwater caverns of our unconscious to give denial such potency? Padel considers “the nightmare of a psyche so dry it is resistant to rain / the water falls straight through / like a love you never noticed.” Yet there’s always the sparkle of hope, summed up by a lamp created out of saltwater by an indigenous community to light their night fishing.

Philosophy, psychology, myth, laughter and pain, Watershed is a celebration of fluidity, illuminating the mystery of water in its unceasing flex and flow.

The cover features a detail from Wave breaking by Maggi Hambling (oil on canvas, 2005).

The book is published by Hazel Press, an independent publisher focusing on the environment, the realities of the climate crisis, feminism and the arts.

• Read a poem from the book, and learn about the sequence, in the Guardian Poem of the Week. 

• The poems grew from an earlier sequence 24 Splashes of Denial which Ruth recorded for Writers Rebel. Her reading was set to music by composer Vik Sharma. 

• Hear Ruth and Vik discuss their collaboration on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb.

• Hear Ruth discuss Watershed with poet Sean Borodale on a London Review Bookshop podcast.

From the reviews

‘Watershed’s emotional impact stems from the beauty of Padel’s language and her commitment to art in the face of crisis. ‘Lady of the Lake’ reimagines one of Britain’s most powerful myths in a setting of environmental horror. Its power rests in its transformation of an atoll of microplastics like an oil-slick rainbow into illusory beauty. She resists despair by embracing the creative expression of beauty. In a poem celebrating Marian Anderson singing ‘Deep River’, her own voice too is like ‘the sparkle of rain watering the earth / and the journey this drop from my tap has taken to get here.’ Kevin Gardner, Wild Court