Rembrandt Would Have Loved You - Tapa blanda

"An intense and sensitive sequence of poems" (Independent)

"Her poems are delicate but with an unusual delicacy" (The Times)

"Sexy love poetry" (Guardian)

"A daring blend of fire and ice, passion and design" (Jo Shapcott)

Ruth Padel's passionate new collection is a woman's eye view of a love affair, with darker undercurrents of mortality and loss. Shifting between vulnerability and guilt, innocence and doubt, tenderness and frustration, teasing reproach and the exaltation of deep love and sexual happiness, Padel's extraordinarily bold and intimate book explores the complexity of emotions that go with falling in love.

Wonderfully versatile in tone, it blends the lyrical and the colloquial, formality and wit, myth and the Spice Girls. It includes the poem that won the 1996 National Poetry Competition 'Icicles round a tree in Dumfriesshire'.