First Rain in Paradise

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.

Table of 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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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. True stars in poetry like Gwyneth Lewis always match brilliance with warmth. She is the one to bet on. Such exuberant invention… The range of reference is so wide, we are intoxicated by it. One of the most exhilaratingly gifted poets of her generation.