Thanks to the lovely people at Yellow Kite/Hodder and Stoughton for providing me with a copy of this new poetry book for review.
As always, opinions are entirely my own.
I’ve long been an advocate of literature as a means of wellbeing – for lots of us in the blogging community, books are where we relax, engage, challenge ourselves and zone out of everyday problems and stresses.
With this in mind, I was delighted to be asked to review Rachel Kelly’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs’. Kelly is a Sunday Times bestselling author as well as a mental health campaigner so I was interested in her poetry collection – an anthology of poems that have helped her over the years.
The book was born from Kelly’s own experiences of poetry as avid reader, sharer, memoriser and occasional writer. Poetry was one thing she enjoyed with her late mother and it is evident that her connection to the poems she has chosen is intense, genuine and heartfelt. The poems are organised within the anthology in seasons, beginning with Winter – poems for the toughest times. The collection then moves through the other seasons with their connotations of hope, new beginnings, endings and time moving on.
Each of the 52 ‘poems’ (there are a few prose pieces) chosen has a helpful accompanying commentary which highlights some of the writing’s key messages and techniques or gives an insight into why it resonates with Kelly. There is also an interesting section at the end of the book about how to read, enjoy, learn and use poetry, as well as short biographies of all the writers in the collection.
I’m already a keen reader of poetry so it was lovely to see Kelly’s selection of poems included some old favourites as well as plenty of poetry that was new to me – and at least one piece written for the book. This would be a lovely collection to dip into as needed but – me being me – I inhaled the lot in just two sittings.
There’s a lot of unsurprising choices in the book – for wellbeing, I get that people might want to turn to the Romantic poets and the solace they found in nature, so I understand the inclusion of Wordsworth and Keats. Personally, I don’t have quite the same response to nature which is too cold, muddy and uncomfortable for me! That aside, a lot of the ‘big names’ in the literature canon are here – Yeats, Brontes, Milton, Herbert, Barrett Browning, Dickinson – but also plenty of newer choices too.
Indeed, I found the collection most exciting when it went most off-piste from the expected. It was lovely to see an unusual Inuit prayer, an African American spiritual, some words of wisdom from Abraham Lincoln, plus modern poets such as Tishani Doshi, Grace Nichols and Mimi Khalvati.
Any anthology like this is going to be hit and miss in different parts for different readers – choosing a selection of poetry is, by its very nature, a personal task and so is most meaningful for the chooser. However, Kelly has done an excellent job of choosing a broad selection of profound, interesting and varied poetry. Some poems chimed with me, others didn’t, but I enjoyed the selection – and it sparked a conversation within my brain about what I would choose that would resonate with me personally.
It’s worth mentioning that this book would make a lovely gift. It is a beautiful book, illustrated with some black and while nature pictures and thoughtfully laid out. It would be best for those readers who perhaps don’t already have a depth of poetry knowledge as I think it introduces poets and the concept of poetry for wellbeing engagingly. That said, there’s plenty for us seasoned old hands too!
If you’d like to buy a copy of this book, please use my affiliate link below – thanks for supporting my blog with any purchases.
If literature for mental health and wellbeing is an idea of interest to you, here are a few more suggestions (affiliate links):
