Keeping Mum

by Gwyneth Lewis

A poetry sequel to Sunbathing in the Rain, this book is about depression. It is partly set in a mental hospital, but the treatment here, is playful and uplifting. The author has written this book first in Welsh, and then reinvenented and expanded it in English.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

Gwyneth Lewis was Wales' National Poet from 2005-06, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. She has published eight books of poetry in Welsh and English. Chaotic Angels (Bloodaxe Books, 2005) brings together the poems from her three English collections, Parables & Faxes, Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum. Her latest book is Sparrow Tree. Gwyneth wrote the six-foot-high words for the front of Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre (which are located just in front of the space-time continuum, as seen on Dr Who and Torchwood.)

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Bilingual poet Lewis isn’t ‘keeping mum’ about the decline of her ‘mother’ tongue, Welsh. The first section of this collection is based on translations of her Welsh prose work, The Language Murderer. I loved the lines questioning the links between words and what they signify, such as “Lleian wen is not the same as ‘smew’ / because it’s another point of view” (from “What’s in a Name?”) and “Someone’s cut the string / between each word and its matching thing” (from “Aphasia”). Part II is subtitled “Memoirs of a Psychiatrist” and gives wry observations on therapy, as well as some imagined dictation from a Miss D’s case tapes. In a book all about language, I liked how braille was twice used as a metaphor. My favorite poem from this section is the alliteration-rich “Spread a Little Happiness”: “Now that millions are taking the pills / and pissing out Prozac, the salmon trout / are very much mellower”. The dozen poems of Part III are all about angels in one sense or another; the most poignant of these is “In Memory of Katherine James,” a musician who died in 9/11: “I hear / her lovely harmonics in that terrible roar.”

[Natalie (CuriousReader) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gwyneth Lewis's collection 'Keeping Mum' is divided into three parts. Opening with The Language Murderer section, Lewis writes about language and the concept of a mother tongue or national languages, especially the feeling of loss in the changing state of global communication; very interesting topics but I found only a few really hit home for me, like the first one:

A Poet's Confession
'I did it. I killed my mother tongue.
I shouldn't have left her
there on her own.
All I wanted was a bit of fun
with another body
but now that she's gone -
it's a terrible silence.

She was highly strung,
quite possibly jealous.
After all, I'm young
and she, the beauty,
had become a crone
despite all the surgery.

Could I have saved her?
made her feel at home?

Without her reproaches.
I feel so numb,
not free, as I'd thought...

Tell my lawyer to come.
Until he's with me,
I'm keeping mum.'

The third section, "Chaotic Angels", I didn't care for at all. I suppose it's more general and distanced, like poems about life on the large scale and I found little in it to grasp on to. The second section, "Keeping Mum" was my favorite part - in these poems, Lewis writes about mental health and mental illness, often with a mixture of beauty and rawness that made me shiver. Below are one of my favorites out of this section:

Early Days in Psychiatry
Before the arrival of modern medicines
patients were frozen like statuary,
condemned to act the seven deadly sins
in tableaux of torment. We set some free

with lithium (remember Lot's wife?
her salt helps the heavy).
Even the barbarous ECT
seemed like a miracle. Rural life

was a nightmare. We'd find
children kept in chicken sheds
rocking like roosters, out of their minds
with neglect. A boy, half dead,

chained like a dog. Although we freed
his body, we never touched the fear
that held him - a stronger, invisible lead -
to that stinking farmyard. We'd hear

whispers of incest and often see
moon faces in windows, hurriedly withdrawn.
But I learned their code of secrecy,
listened at hedges and prescribed to thorns."

Overall I enjoyed some of these poems a good deal but not enough to make up for the larger chunks I either felt nothing toward or directly disliked. On the whole an alright collection but would've been more interesting on mental illness alone.

[Frida Leijon Lundqvist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mae'n hyfryd iawn! Dw i dim darllen yr addasau saesneg ond dw i'n hoff iawn o'r llofrudd iaith.

[Ray Noyes · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of her best. Warm and intimate.