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First Rain In Paradise

First Rain In Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis

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.