I share this blog post with Rachel Kelly writer and mental health advocate.
In her new book Rachel shows how poetry unlocks deep feelings and in so doing allows for self-acceptance. You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs is a delight to read. The poems reflect the gamut of emotions from the depths of despair to hope and joy. Each one accompanied with her personal response, clarity of understanding and reflection. Turn to the end and there are biographies of each poet, which I really enjoyed.
I came across Rachel talking about her first book: Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me: My Journey Through Depression on Woman’s Hour (BBC Radio 4, 2014). I wrote to her:
It is the first time I have heard someone describe getting ill in three days flat from being apparently OK. That is what has happened to me. Six times!
A lovely connection was forged and I felt supported to publish my own writing about severe mental illness.
Depression
Rachel writes:
I described how poetry had been my friend when I fell ill in my thirties with severe depression and subsequently recovered. I know this lovely sense of companionship that poetry bestows, not just from my own personal experience, but also from running poetry-reading groups in schools, charities, and prisons for the last eight years. The results I saw, and the way that people were helped, convinced me of poetry’s power to keep us company. I have also become convinced that poetry is not just there for difficult times. It also can amplify our feelings of joy.
Poetry helps my own psychological wellbeing through making me feel less alone. Through poetry we discover other people who have experienced similar sentiments, and we are not solitary in our despair or indeed our delight.
***
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.
[from: No Worst There Is None]
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was, in Victorian sentiments, a melancholic. This poem is possibly one of the most apt expressions of depression.
Rachel writes:
There is no end to this depression, . . . Of all the extraordinary ways Hopkins finds to divulge the depth of those feelings, for me the most extraordinary is that image of the mind having chasms down which we fall.
Poetry matters at a time when many of us feel emotionally isolated. Sharing words allows us to become more connected to ourselves and others (not least the poets themselves), and this has never been more true or necessary than during our uncertain times.
***
Feelings at a Slant
When I (Monica) am emotionally stilled by a poem it is as if the poet’s words have entered my body: mind and spirit, the core of my being. The brilliance of poems is finding the integrity of language and literary style, rhythms and rhymes, images to conjure up in the imagination, words that create an experience. The poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote: Tell the truth, but tell it slant. The art of poetry conveys meaning in layers and juxtapositions of human experience, contained and satisfying on the page.
Love & Beauty
Rachel writes:
Derek Walcott’s poem ‘Love After Love’ works its magic, unlocks and allows feelings in a new way and leads us to believe in a new relationship with ourselves. ‘You will love again the stranger who was your self.
or
Take George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’. This is a poem for anyone who doubts their lovability. The narrator in the poem encapsulates his own sense of desperation: he feels ‘guilty of dust and sin’, which described how I felt when I was unwell. And by describing the pain in an artistically perfect way, Herbert draws its sting. The perfection of his words allowed me to inhabit that feeling, rather than resisting or fearing it.
and
Sapho’s Fragments (7BC) ‘on beauty’ have survived over so many centuries. I feel connected to her across time. Our worlds are different, but what matters is the same. Two short lines conjure a whole philosophy.
***
Wild Geese
This poem is one of my favourites. Mary Oliver (1935-2019) writes with the intimate voice of the second person you. The poem is addressed to us all, connecting us to nature, to the ‘soft animal’ of our bodies, to despair. Rachel unpacks all of this and that need for the ‘feeling of belonging’. ‘Oliver’s world’ she writes: ‘is one in which we all belong . . . [a world] in which we do not have to be other than who we are.’
The overarching message is that we all belong to ‘the family of things.’ And we are going home. With my own practice of writing, I go home to myself whenever I want. I am someone who writes head on with my feelings and that means I am always connecting with myself.
Last words from Rachel:
When we have a poem by our side, whether on a bedside table or tucked into a bag, it feels as if we are accompanied by a friend: an authorial arm is wrapped around our shoulders.
Rachel’s book of poems for the ups and downs of life will make an excellent Christmas present. I’ll be buying a few for family and friends.
© Rachel Kelly and Monica Suswin — December 2022
You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs Published by Yellow Kite and available from: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/you-ll-never-walk-alone-poems-for-life-s-ups-and-downs/9781529395341
https://www.rachel-kelly.net