Lewis, Gwyneth
Entry updated 29 October 2021. Tagged: Author.
(1959- ) Welsh poet, active from the mid-1970s; she publishes in both Welsh and English. She is of sf interest for two narrative poems. Zero Gravity (1998) Equipoises two versions of significant journey: an astronaut's involvement in the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope; and an array of internal odysseys, at least one of them deathwards. More complexly, the Fantastic Voyage undertaken in A Hospital Odyssey (2010) may initially seem enclosed within the hospital where the narrator's husband could be dying of cancer: but the Inner-Space hospital-universe into which she shrinks is simultaneously her husband's body (see Miniaturization), an Edifice [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], a Keep, an Archipelago, and a Pocket Universe. Lewis's diction is assured and drives the complex narrative with absorbing clarity. [JC]
Gwyneth Lewis
born Cardiff, Wales: 1959
works (highly selected)
- Zero Gravity (Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear: Bloodaxe Books, 1998) [poem: pb/]
- A Hospital Odyssey (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2010) [poem: pb/from Leonora Carrington, "Took my Way Down, Like a Messenger, to the Deep"]
links
previous versions of this entry