First Rain in Paradise
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
First Rain in Paradise is a book about falling. Gwyneth Lewis’s highly inventive poems trace an interior landscape carved out by the trauma of childhood emotional abuse through subsequent chronic ill health and towards a hard-won resurrection.
These accounts of living in and emerging from the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Suffering does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it, in poems written from the shadows but committed to the light. This work refuses to keep pain a secret. Shame is a lurking presence.
Gwyneth Lewis has won wide acclaim for her versatile and varied writing across genres, most notably in her award-winning poetry in both English and Welsh. This book shows a deepening of her technical, imaginative and intellectual resources which are challenged and exercised to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism and – most importantly – with joy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The bracing latest collection from Welsh poet Lewis (Chaotic Angels) traces an arc from the trauma of maternal abuse ("she abseils and crawls/ ticking, inside my ear") through aftershocks of chronic illness, self-harm, and shame ("I'm roadkill,/ waiting for the coup de grâce") to recovery ("I am found"). Her lines both stun and revive, moving between Plathian imagery ("It's the snare in the brain, spring-loaded/ for suicide") and disarming candor ("Underneath, I'm a bit of a sweetie"). The collection radiates hard-won self-possession: "Who says you can't choose// your own household gods?" By the time she pleads, "Give me moths for eyelids, or a world/ I can bear," the reader has come to trust the poet's resilience. In thickets of lush language ("I'm here for the final/ sugar-rush, as fruit flush to bruises"), austere life lessons are offered: "Being alive/ is both trauma and sovereign /remedy. You cannot choose." Quiet persistence is both a life skill and a literary strategy: "I've lived so long now on so little// that the merest wisp of a thermal/ pulls me aloft, the stitch that was dropped// picked up again." Readers will enjoy discovering this writer of extraordinary gifts.
