First Rain in Paradise is a book about falling. Starting with a 15th-century manuscript depicting the fall of Adam and Eve, the poems present a portrait of a drenched, catastrophic landscape, asking how human trauma relates to a fantasy Eden. Shame is a lurking presence. Horror has to be confronted, lending a gothic tone to a series of poems about spiders.
Gwyneth Lewis’s highly inventive poems trace an interior landscape carved out between the trauma of childhood emotional abuse, subsequent chronic ill health, and a tentative movement towards a hard-won resurrection. These accounts of living in and emerging out of the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Pain does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it, in poems written from the dark but committed to the light.
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. First Rain in Paradise is her sixth collection of poems in English. The book shows a deepening of her technical and imaginative resources which are challenged and questioned to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism as well as – most importantly – with joy.
‘Her lines both stun and revive, moving between Plathian imagery… and disarming candor… The collection radiates hard-won self-possession… The reader come[s] to trust the poet’s resilience… Readers will enjoy discovering this writer of extraordinary gifts’.
Publisher’s Weekly
From a Welsh poet well used to crossing borders comes a sixth collection of ardour and courage…These are poems of darkness and danger — probing, unsettling, appalling… also delightful, finding humour and pleasure where they can.
Vona Groarke, The Irish Times
Gwyneth Lewis’ latest poetry collection is one which navigates darkness with both weight and wit… What’s striking… is its technical daring… Despite the depth of pain that is being explored… humour, sharp and sure, also shines through, lending its lightening (in both senses of the word) to proceedings… Lewis has long been a writer of rare skill, but this latest whose her at the height of her imaginative and intellectual powers… [It is] a marvel, and a very affecting reading experience indeed.
Mab Jones, buzz