First Rain in Paradise

by Gwyneth Lewis

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 96
Rating:

Synopsis:

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.

I was very curious about Gwyneth Lewis’ First Rain in Paradise; I’m very interested in Welsh literature in English, and the fact that Lewis writes in both Welsh and English was also a draw. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this collection at all, especially since the opening is poem is (on the surface) all about spiders and they recur as an image in several poems. Nooot ideal for me, ahaha.

But just beyond that surface level of using the spider imagery, I didn’t really find myself enjoying the style or choice of words, and the poems didn’t seem to sink in and hook me. I didn’t find anything I wanted to save to quote for the review, even, which I try to do.

Not a collection for me, alas, though I might try something else by Lewis if the National Poetry Library has another volume, just to see if the spiders threw me off.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)