Book review: Nightshade Mother by Gwyneth Lewis

clare e. potter

Former National Poet of Wales, Gwyneth Lewis, with over twenty Welsh and English books in poetry, prose, drama and nonfiction, has written what is arguably her most important book.

Nightshade Mother is her third memoir, following Sunbathing in the Rain, and Two in a Boat. Here is a courageous author examining the painful childhood wounds and suffering caused from dysfunctional parenting, particularly with her mother and in so doing is seeking to reclaim every element of herself.

This is healing work at its best. Necessary and vital. The book is eloquent and powerful, told with much skill, calling on literary excerpts, personal letters and diary entries, photographs, poetry (and a monkey’s voice) both as evidence of relentless harm and as torch lights guiding the way to recovery.

Conflicted

The telling and the gathering of the pieces for the telling are key features in the narrative. Indeed, the author does not shy away from how difficult this work is and how conflicted she feels about writing so openly about family failings, even her own.

Despite this tension, telling her story is a matter of life and death. Even though Lewis admits that, at times, shaping it costs her: ‘writing this book now feels like it’s killing me,’ she is also unwavering about the need to tell it. It’s only after a chance encounter with a stranger in a graveyard during lockdown that she feels ‘safe enough to feel it all.’

Exceptional

That graveyard encounter is one of many exceptional metaphors that serve as turning points which allow the narrative to say more than is on the surface. We’d expect nothing less from such an accomplished poet. The act of writing (and choosing not to write) poetry also features as a key thread; the conflict of this writer’s urge to shape and express herself and the impediment to this is hinted at in a faulty heirloom fountain pen.

It’s when she is ten that Gwyneth Lewis finds a way to deal with the misery heaped upon her—the act of writing. It gives her ‘the otherlife,’ one she excels in and finds a nascent power.

But even here, she recounts how her mother (who she purposely refers to by her first name, Eryl) trespasses, interfering with her daughter’s creative life, correcting, assuming, controlling. The author expresses how complicated this intrusion is given the irony that her mother (a teacher and a frustrated writer herself) ‘teaches me to expand what I can do with words,’ even buying her a typewriter, and that Lewis receives her mother’s much desired approval through this talent.

Welsh language complexity

An important aspect of this book is how the Welsh language takes its place but also is put in its place. Quite often we are reluctant to criticize our own culture, particularly when it is a minority language culture, but Gwyneth Lewis is bold enough to untangle the complicated relationship she has with her language given she has been ‘deeply wounded by the mother who taught [her] Welsh.’

Lewis goes back in time, beyond her own upbringing, to her parents’ parents, trying to ascertain how such cruelty and coldness could have seeded itself. There is much depth to this scrutiny, particularly in regard to her mother Eryl’s own ‘bed-ridden mean-tempered’ mother.

Lewis allows much of the narrative to unfold with perfectly crafted images, for example her ancestral grandfather clock which, when being moved from the Crugeryr family farm to Cardiff, has to be dismantled and consequently reassembled by her father. This is a striking scene that does much to illustrate both the inner world of the child Gwyneth and the adult poet who is able to carve such powerful metaphor. She includes ‘Yr Etifedd’ (‘The Heir’) a poem she’d written about transporting the clock, and with no room in the car, she imagines, her family had to ‘pull out the crooked pendulum’ and lie her down in the clock’s long case—like a corpse in a coffin.

Hostage

On surface level, it’s the child held time’s hostage, but also this child of the poem is given agency when she is positioned where what’s faulty and out of sync is detached and this becomes a gift to (and from) her future self, the poet who reframes and thus reclaims this narrative. In Nightshade Mother, Gwyneth Lewis is not only looking to reassemble herself as her father does with rebuilding the clock’s mechanics, but here she is, recalibrating time’s telling and its rhythms — on her own terms.

When clearing out her late parents’ house, she rediscovers her childhood toy, a glove-puppet, Mwnci (monkey). This is such a tender moment when the reader understands that the voice that has been her ally throughout the book (and her comfort during childhood) is this puppet who gives her permission to be honest and brave now in the telling, ‘I’ll say it even if you can’t.’ The glove puppet is a beautiful metaphor for the hand that holds itself, the inner voice that knew injustice and would always find a way to speak out.

Suffering

Gwyneth Lewis is unflinchingly open about her suffering, how for years her mind used to perceive her ‘as a trespasser in [her] own life.’ But this book is not self-pitying or mawkish, it is the writer reclaiming her own inner and outer territory, of her body and mind, her creativity, her language and home. And it is triumphant in that.

Nightshade Mother is written with eloquence and mettle. In these pages we are let into the process of the writing through which Gwyneth Lewis exorcises the myriad ‘malevolent ghosts’ that almost consumed her. By the end of it, she inhabits all her spaces, her mother relegated to a visitor, ‘not invited to stay.’ And though she says this is no ‘confessional catharsis,’ the reader is heartened by the unwavering voice at the end, the fearless, formidable woman who like Mwnci shows us how crucial it is to speak our truth, and to be heard.

Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling by Gwyneth Lewis is published by Calon. It is available from all good bookshops.