Ruth Padel and Ilya Kaminsky in Conversation at Granta

Ilya Kaminsky discusses how being a refugee shaped the narrative of Deaf Republic, and Ruth Padel details her "next obsession, next creative shape," in a new conversation at Granta. Padel's current moment:

I’ve written a sequence about water and climate denial for Writers Rebel, part of Extinction Rebellion, called Twenty-Four Splashes of Denial. I’m waiting to see what else comes around that. The gods of fire and water . . .

A few new poems about lockdown, the pandemic, even the flickery experience of teaching on Microsoft Teams, address the disorientation we all feel about the disintegrating of the world we’ve known. Environmentally, politically, economically, semantically – why do software commands mean what they say? Who decided? How do we navigate the loss of old meanings, the new ones sprouting all over the place, that feeling of being lost in black spaces of a damaged world?

The nature obsession in my work is always there, it has grown from Darwin to tigers, a novel about wildlife crime, and was the drive behind my migration book. Now I’m researching a prose book on Asian elephants and our relations with them, imaginative and real. I don’t know if any poems will come out of that. We identify with them in surprising ways.

And next year is the two hundredth year of Greek independence and my second novel is coming out, set on Crete, where I’ve lived on and off since I was a Classics student, where I learned to speak modern Greek and have lifelong friends. The novel ends with lockdown on Crete, but draws on the sudden destruction of civilizations: the Minoans, but also the Jewish community on Crete. Greece, its poetry and ways of seeing, is in at the foundation of everything for me.

And you? What is your next obsession? The poems of Dancing in Odessa, their rhythms and lyric concentration reminded me of Sylvia Plath saying, ‘You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space, you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.’ Where are you now? What’s the next thing?

Kaminsky's response, and more, at Granta.