First Rain in Paradise

The bracing latest collection from Welsh poet Lewis (Chaotic Angels) traces an arc from the trauma of maternal abuse (“she abseils and crawls/ ticking, inside my ear”) through aftershocks of chronic illness, self-harm, and shame (“I’m roadkill,/ waiting for the coup de grâce”) to recovery (“I am found”). Her lines both stun and revive, moving between Plathian imagery (“It’s the snare in the brain, spring-loaded/ for suicide”) and disarming candor (“Underneath, I’m a bit of a sweetie”). The collection radiates hard-won self-possession: “Who says you can’t choose// your own household gods?” By the time she pleads, “Give me moths for eyelids, or a world/ I can bear,” the reader has come to trust the poet’s resilience. In thickets of lush language (“I’m here for the final/ sugar-rush, as fruit flush to bruises”), austere life lessons are offered: “Being alive/ is both trauma and sovereign /remedy. You cannot choose.” Quiet persistence is both a life skill and a literary strategy: “I’ve lived so long now on so little// that the merest wisp of a thermal/ pulls me aloft, the stitch that was dropped// picked up again.” Readers will enjoy discovering this writer of extraordinary gifts. (May)