Keeping Mum: Voices from Therapy - Softcover

Lewis, Gwyneth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852245832 ISBN 13: 9781852245832

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2003

Synopsis

Keeping Mum is the latest book of poems in English from Wales's bilingual virtuoso. It is a psychiatric detective story which explores the effect of a dying language on its speakers and looks at how abuses of language might lead to mental illness. Her investigation begins with a police interrogation, then broadens to take in a mental hospital, where the subject is questioned by a psychiatrist. Finally she uncovers angels in a sequence of sonnets,finding messengers from another realm inside our everyday lives, speaking to us through depression and bereavement. Usually Gwyneth Lewis writes one book in Welsh, then a completely different one in English. Only Welsh-speakers get to see how both sides of her work express the dual personality of her country. Ruth McElroy has described how Lewis's books mark `a shift into a different gear of Welsh poetry of both languages...she is one of very few poets to be equally probing and technically sophisticated in both languages...intuitively sensitive to the peculiarities of each'. Keeping Mum started out as a translation of Gwyneth Lewis's last Welsh book, Y Llofrudd Iaith or `The Language Murderer', but took on a life of its own. The plot, characters and location have been completely recast in English.

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Review

The detective story is as much a structure as a requiem, and we may see that patterns and structures are themselves themes in her poetry. It is at once a religious and a scientific fascination, not with the structures and patterns that explain or console, but with those that mystify and make strange. -- Patrick McGuinness * London Review of Books *

About the Author

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 other books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (Flamingo, 2002) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005) and The Meat Tree: new stories from the Mabinogion (Seren, 2010). 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1852245832
• ISBN 13: 9781852245832
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64