Gwyneth Lewis’s sixth collection of poems in English traces the interior landscape carved out between the trauma of childhood emotional abuse, subsequent chronic ill health and the tentative movement towards a hard-won resurrection. These accounts of living in and emerging out of the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Taken together, the book is evidence of the richness and exhilarations to be found in constructive suffering, despite all the losses. Pain does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it. These are poems written from the dark but committed to the light.
As a whole, the collection is about falling. Starting with a 15th-century manuscript depicting the fall of Adam and Eve, First Rain in Paradise is a portrait of a drenched, catastrophic landscape, asking how human trauma relates to a fantasy Eden. Shame is a keynote, and the tone of a series of poems about spiders is gothic. Horror has to be looked at full in the face and generates a wild inventiveness under the pressure of migraine auras and the glimpses of alternative realities they offer, even within the context of brain malfunction.
First Rain in Paradise shows a deepening of Gwyneth Lewis’s technical and imaginative abilities, challenged and questioned to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism as well as – most importantly – joy.
‘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.
‘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 reads two poems
Gwyneth Lewis reads two poems from Chaotic Angels: Poems in English (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), 'Welsh Espionage' [5] and 'Mother Tongue'. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).
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