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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.
'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
‘Felicitous, urbane, heartbreaking, the poems of Gwyneth Lewis form a universe whose planets use language for oxygen and thus are inhabitable.’ – Joseph Brodsky
‘True stars in poetry like Gwyneth Lewis always match brilliance with warmth. She is the one to bet on.’ – Les Murray
‘One of the most exhilaratingly gifted poets of her generation.’ – M. Wynn Thomas, Guardian
‘Such exuberant invention… The range of reference is so wide, we are intoxicated by it.’ – Elaine Feinstein, Independent
‘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). 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 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. Gwyneth Lewis lives in Cardiff, Wales, and has spent a number of years in the USA, where she was a student at the graduate writing division of Columbia University in New York. She has held fellowships at Harvard and Stanford and a teaching position at Princeton University’s English department. She teaches regularly at Middlebury College’s world-renowned Bread Loaf School of English program and, in 2016, was the 2016 Robert Frost Professor of Literature in Vermont. Her critical study, The Poetry Detective: Writing and Reading Poetry Through Fear, is published by Princeton University Press in 2025.
Spiderings
15 Spider Mother
16 Snare
17 Maze
18 Missing
19 Not My Doll But Just Like Her
20 Any Eight Legs Will Do
21 Spidering
22 Away!
*
25 Principalities, Dominions
26 Stage Manager’s Notes
27 Helpless
II. Unwell
31 Auras
34 Another Day Ill in Bed
35 Red Waistcoat
36 Will I?
37 Too Far
38 Persephone in CERN
39 Damage
40 Lips
41 Earrings from the Anti-Matter Factory
42 Under
43 Rogue Female
44 Fooled Me for Years with the Wrong Pronoun
45 Fallen Objects that Can’t Be Saved
46 Relic
47 Chronic Fatigue
48 Desolation
49 Ice Mummy
50 The Long Crawl up Humanity’s Beach
51 Ear, Nose and Throat
52 Grottarossa Mummy
III. Recovery
55 Awake
56 Flowers of the Wayside and Meadow
57 A Litter Herbal
58 Late Blackberries
59 On Stopping the Anti-Depressants
60 Three Ways into Water
61 The Beat
62 Riverlarking
First Rain in Paradise
65 Previous
66 Shame
67 Kidnapped
68 Floods
69 Expulsion
*
71 Ornithology
72 An Explanation of Doily
77 Notes & acknowledgements