First Rain in Paradise

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) and The Poetry Detective: Writing and Reading Poetry Through Fear (Princeton University Press, 2025). 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 lives in Cardiff, and teaches at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont. She has been Artist in Residence in 2023 and 2024 at Balliol College, Oxford, where she did her doctorate in 1985 and is an Honorary Fellow. 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.

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.

• I. FallingSpiderings15 Spider Mother16 Snare17 Maze18 Missing19 Not My Doll But Just Like Her20 Any Eight Legs Will Do21 Spidering22 Away!*25 Principalities, Dominions26 Stage Manager’s Notes27 HelplessII. Unwell31 Auras34 Another Day Ill in Bed35 Red Waistcoat36 Will I?37 Too Far38 Persephone in CERN39 Damage40 Lips41 Earrings from the Anti-Matter Factory42 Under43 Rogue Female44 Fooled Me for Years with the Wrong Pronoun45 Fallen Objects that Can’t Be Saved46 Relic47 Chronic Fatigue48 Desolation49 Ice Mummy50 The Long Crawl up Humanity’s Beach51 Ear, Nose and Throat52 Grottarossa MummyIII. Recovery55 Awake56 Flowers of the Wayside and Meadow57 A Litter Herbal58 Late Blackberries59 On Stopping the Anti-Depressants60 Three Ways into Water61 The Beat62 RiverlarkingFirst Rain in Paradise65 Previous66 Shame67 Kidnapped68 Floods69 Expulsion*71 Ornithology72 An Explanation of Doily77 Notes & acknowledgements