Full Description
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.
Contents
I. Falling
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
