Silent Letters of the Alphabet

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject.

Ruth Padel's lectures link metaphor to silence and white space on a page. Equating a poem's music with its politics, she explores tone, register and harmony, suggesting that how poems hold our "attention" is through "tension". Finally, she investigates what it means for poems that they are "given to" other people.

With her trademark blend of literary analysis, psychological and mythical learning, an intimate knowledge of Greek poetics plus a generous and joyful trust in the energy of today's poetry, Ruth Padel plumbs unheard rhymes, Echo and Narcissus, the silent music of John Cage, and what happens when Paul Durcan plays Seamus Heaney at ping pong.

She wears her erudition lightly, paying playful attention to the resonances of many different poems - and to their smaller atoms, words and syllables. A fascinating and groundbreaking book, Silent Letters of the Alphabet is a gift for anyone writing, reading or teaching poetry today.

Ruth Padel has published seven poetry collections. Her latest, Darwin: A Life in Poems, is a biography through lyric poems of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin. Her non-fiction includes a study of rock music and Greek myth, two studies of Greek tragedy and the mind, and a nature book tracing her journeys in search of tigers in Bhutan, Nepal, Laos, Sumatra, Russia, China and India. Her books on reading modern poetry, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey, came out of her weekly column in The Independent on Sunday. In 2009, drawing on her work in tropical conservation, she published her first novel, Where the Serpent Lives.