First Rain in Paradise

<p><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>First Rain in Paradise</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)> 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. The book opens with 'Spiderings' a gothic horror sequence about the effects of maternal abuse. Then comes a descent into underworlds of debasement and debility. The third title sequence begins with a 15th-century manuscript depicting the fall of Adam and Eve the poems presenting a portrait of a drenched catastrophic landscape asking how human trauma relates to a fantasy Eden. 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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>'The bracing latest collection from Welsh poet Lewis traces an arc from the trauma of maternal abuse...through aftershocks of chronic illness self-harm and shame...to recovery ('I am found'). Her lines both stun and revive moving between Plathian imagery... and disarming candor ('Underneath I'm a bit of a sweetie'). The collection radiates hard-won self-possession... Readers will enjoy discovering this writer of extraordinary gifts.' - </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>Publishers Weekly</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)> starred review of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>First Rain in Paradise</em></p><p></p>