Gwyneth Lewis

In this extraordinary memoir, Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, recounts her toxic upbringing at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother. It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, keeping diaries since childhood. In these journals, she interrogates the emotionally abusive relationship she experienced, in great pain but determined to find...

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 this extraordinary memoir, Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, recounts her toxic upbringing at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother. It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, keeping diaries since childhood. In these journals, she interrogates the emotionally abusive relationship she experienced, in great pain but determined to find...