Darwin: A Life in Poems
By Ruth Padel
Chatto & Windus £12.99, 141 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

Ruth Padel’s stunning sequence of poems is infinitely more than an anniversary keepsake or a tribute to her great-great grandfather, Charles Darwin. It is a unique biography. Teeming with facts and creatures, it builds into an imaginative and dynamic response to a man who changed the way we understand ourselves.

A short introduction lays out the shape of Darwin’s life and Padel’s delightful marginalia secure the poems in historical context. But the freedom of the form allows her to explore Darwin’s emotional and intellectual development outside the linear conventions of even the best biographies. Poetry is very good on doubt, on stasis, silence, ambivalence and loss. In Padel’s hands, it is also superb at moving from domestic minutiae to the broadest sweeps of 19th-century life and thought. In the poem “Symptoms”, what unfolds is not just Emma Darwin’s first pregnancy but also of the birth of new worlds:

“January 1839. The British East India Company/ captures Aden. In March ‘OK’ from oll korrect/appears first time in the Boston Evening Globe./Michael Faraday clarifies the nature of electricity./In April, she writes ‘Pregnant’.”

The dark point of Darwin’s life was the death of his 10-year-old daughter. “The pain will never fade,” Charles wrote. Padel recreates the loneliness of a man who, had no belief in an after-life. “Reticence descends on the house/ like an ostrich on its nest: a belljar of black feathers./ Etty, missing her sister, terrified of all/the not-talking.”

The poems borrow from family letters and the Bible: “now we see through a glass darkly. Then face to face.” Here, for a moment, are John Milton, novelist Maria Edgeworth, and obstetrician James Blundell: the voices of Darwin’s world.

Padel works in dialogue that shares the lyricism at the core of Darwin’s writing. She is at her best when observing the natural world that so inspired her forefather.

“The night pitch-dark. The whole sea luminous. Every part of water which by day is seen as foam glowed with pale light,” observed Darwin in 1832.

“The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets”, responds his brilliant descendant in the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Elizabeth Speller is author of ‘Following Hadrian’ (Faber)