First Rain in Paradise. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.First Rain in Paradise

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. 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.

'Gwyneth Lewis’ First Rain in Paradise traces an arc from the crucible of childhood emotional abuse and persistent illness, moving toward a hard-earned renewal. For me, these poems mix the formal with a quiet informal intimacy. Trauma is deciphered in measured candour in a language functioning simultaneously as the site of injury and an instrument of reclamation.' – Taz Rahman, The Lonely Crowd (Books of the Year 2025, Part Three)

'First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis is ‘a book about falling’. A must-read, especially for anyone who enjoyed her memoir, Nightshade Mother.' – Angela Graham, The Lonely Crowd (Books of the Year 2025, Part Two)

‘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.’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review of First Rain in Paradise

‘From a Welsh poet well used to crossing borders comes a sixth collection of ardour and courage. Gwyneth Lewis’s First Rain in Paradise confronts past trauma and debility through the language of invasion and bodily takeover. […] These are poems of darkness and danger – probing, unsettling, appalling. […] Difficult material rendered in unflinchingly challenging imagery, but these poems are also delightful, finding humour and pleasure where they can, as in ‘Late Blackberries’, where the final sugar-rush is relished, even if the crop’s first sweetness has been sacrificed.’ – Vona Groarke, The Irish Times

‘Gwyneth Lewis’ latest poetry collection is one which navigates darkness with both weight and wit. Known for her linguistic precision and inventive forms, Lewis here crafts a landscape of interior struggle, shaped by childhood trauma and chronic illness, yet tempered by a powerful sense of resilience. […] What’s striking about First Rain in Paradise is, as with Lewis’ other books, its technical daring. Lewis doesn’t merely describe emotional landscapes: she builds them, with language that is at once painfully raw and honest yet exquisitely, expertly controlled. […] Lewis has long been a writer of rare skill, but this latest shows her at the height of her imaginative and intellectual powers.’ – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine

'Woven into this strata of highbrow/ lowbrow and amongst the inventive fourth-wall breaks, Lewis’ unusual language commands the reader’s attention. [...] The acuity of physical pain is a hallmark and super-strength of Lewis’ poetic imagination.' – Jemma L. King, New Welsh Review, on First Rain in Paradise

'The structure is theatrical and presents an arc of severe childhood trauma, suffering, pain, and separation from Eden, as well as the hope of recovery. [...] First Rain in Paradise is a collection that not only witnesses survival in the face of intolerable pain but insists on it as the only human strategy, ‘…Being alive / is both trauma and sovereign / remedy. You cannot choose.’ (‘Will I?’)' –Pauline Rowe, Orbis

‘One of the most exhilaratingly gifted poets of her generation.’ – M. Wynn Thomas, The Guardian

‘Such exuberant invention… The range of reference is so wide, we are intoxicated by it.’ – Elaine Feinstein, The Independent

‘True stars in poetry like Gwyneth Lewis always match brilliance with warmth. She is the one to bet on.’ – Les Murray

‘Felicitous, urbane, heartbreaking, the poems of Gwyneth Lewis form a universe whose planets use language for oxygen and thus are inhabitable.’ – Joseph Brodsky

‘Gwyneth Lewis has so many of the gifts required for good poetry: command of form, with improvisation enlivening tradition; supple rhythm; originality of subject-matter and the right eye to pin down detail; humour, both sardonic and direct; and, above all, commitment to human feeling.’ – Peter Porter

Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. Her first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels (2005) from Bloodaxe, which brings together the poems from her English collections, Parables & Faxes, Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum, and by A Hospital Odyssey (2010), and Sparrow Tree (2011), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012. Her sixth collection in English, First Rain in Paradise, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025. Her other books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (Flamingo, 2002), Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005), The Meat Tree: new stories from the Mabinogion (Seren, 2010), Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (University of Wales Press, 2024) and The Poetry Detective: Writing and Reading Poetry Through Fear (Princeton University Press, 2025). With Rowan Williams she translated The Book of Taliesin (2019) for Penguin Classics. Her Welsh collection, Y Llofrudd Iaith (Barddas, 2000), won the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Prize, and her English collection, Keeping Mum was shortlisted for the same prize. Both Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Gwyneth Lewis composed the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, opened in 2004. In 2014 she dramatised her book-length poem A Hospital Odyssey for the BBC, broadcast on Radio 4's Afternoon Drama, and delivered her Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, published in Quantum Poetics (Bloodaxe Books, 2015). She lives in Cardiff, and teaches at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont. She has been Artist in Residence in 2023 and 2024 at Balliol College, Oxford, where she did her doctorate in 1985 and is an Honorary Fellow. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010 for a distinguished body of writing, and in 2022 she received an MBE for her services to literature and mental health.