[4] She taught Greek at Oxford, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, University of London,[5] taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, and at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, for which she helped excavate the Royal Road at Knossos.

[24] Described as an exquisite image-maker and love poet of intense lyricism, delicate skill, deep resonance and a wild generous imagination,[25][26] she went on to elegiac poems exploring loss and bereavement.

A meditation on the colour green, written after her mother's death, "guides us around the world in intense flights of geological and geographical fancy, excavating the truths and mysteries of grief".

[27][28][29] [20][21] Stylistic hallmarks are said to be juxtaposition of the modern world with the ancient,[30] technical skill and musicality;[31] wit, passion, lyrical intelligence, internal and half-rhyme, enjambement and unusual energy within and against the line,[32][33][34][35][36] 'As if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in.

[39] From 1998 to 2004, Padel's collections reflect themes of simultaneously written non-fiction: music (I’m a Man - Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll); technical attention to the poetic line (52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, exemplified in poems such as 'Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfrieshire' her National Poetry Competition winner);[40] and wildlife (Tigers in Red Weather).

[41] Three later collections, Darwin - A Life in Poems and The Mara Crossing (now updated to We Are All From Somewhere Else 2020),[42] include prose;[43][20][21] Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth(2014), with its resonant last line, 'Making is our defence against the dark,'[44] has been called a meditation on conflict and history: especially of the Abrahamic religions.

[45] Emerald (2018), a memoir and meditation on the poet's mother at her death, explored the alchemy of mourning and the renewing value of green.

[55] She has held dialogues with Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti,[56] and written an Introduction to the posthumous poems of Mahmoud Darwish.

"[58] Her innovative poems-and-prose volume The Mara Crossing (2012) revivified the prosimetrum, a medieval mix of poetry and prose,[59][60] It addresses animal and human migration.

[37][87][88] They were received as innovative work by scientists[89] and by the literary community as a "new species" of biography in verse,[33][90][91] whose emotional centre is the Darwins' marriage,[92] shaken by divergent religious belief and the death of a daughter.

Padel's poems connected Darwin's loss of his mother as a child with his passion for collecting;[95] and linked his early scientific writing with his taxidermy teacher in Edinburgh John Edmonstone, a freed slave from Guiana.

[96] Since 2013, Padel has written and performed sequences of poems on composers in conjunction with the Endellion String Quartet: first on Josef Haydn's Seven Last Words,[97][98] which formed the central crucifixion section in her 2014 collection Learning to make an Oud in Nazareth;[58] subsequently on Beethoven's late quartets[99] and Schubert's Death and the Maiden.

[111][112] For BBC Radio 4 she has written and presented features on writers, scientists and composers including Hans Christian Andersen,[5] Edward Elgar, Charles Darwin and W.S.

The composer is "fire-dust, gold-flight /winching upwards into pure light" as he drives "forward into a new-world dawn /thrilling with dissonance, calling up wild-steel angels"'(Times Literary Supplement)[119] During the pandemic she recorded four podcasts on Beethoven's life, illustrated by her poems, and music played by pianist Karl Lutchmayer, the Endellion Quartet, soprano Nina Kanter and the South Asian Symphony Orchestra, for the Bangalore International Centre.

[133][138][139][140] It was praised for its vivid nature writing, intensely observed portrait of Indian forests and wildlife under threat, her innovative use of science and animal's eye viewpoint.

Elephants and tigers under threat from poachers, forests felled for financial gain, corruption and uncaring officialdom result in habitats lost and species disappearing.

[161] Her criticism is reported to employ close analysis, knowledge of Greek poetics, myth, metaphor, tone and rhyme; she is said to read with aural acuity, generosity and no polemic; her precision "does not obscure but builds the big picture", addressing the general reader but with "utmost attention to the page".

"[165][166] She returned to this moment in her foreword to the posthumous volume of Mahmoud Darwish, comparing his sense of the poet's role in a time of violence to that of Seamus Heaney in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and of Eliot during the London blitz.

[2][201][202][203][204][205][206][207] Padel denied connection with these pages but media commentators alleged her involvement; she resigned, saying she did not wish to do the job under suspicion.