First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis Erin Fornoff ” Employing a staccato chorus

” Employing a staccato chorus of fractured

Oxford and then St Andrews University

' – James Caruth

tone and architecture in her Carcanet poetry collections over thirty-three years – free and metrical verse

First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis Erin Fornoff ” Employing a staccato chorusFirst 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