You'll Never Walk Alone: Poems for life's ups and downs

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When you were at your lowest, did you ever envisage a way out and that today, as now a keynote speaker, bestselling writer and mental health advocate, you are sharing your experiences to help others and encourage debate about mental ill-health?

This book will show you how to bring poetry into your everyday emotional reality, where it can be a new tool for wellbeing. And one that means you’ll never walk alone. Nothing compares with the experience of enslaved people. But all of us can feel motherless at times, even if we are blessed with the most loving of mothers. In my darkest hour, when I suffered severe depression, my mother could not comfort me – she who had hitherto been able to soothe any pain. There is, it turns out, a limit to a mother’s ability to succour her child.There is also a section towards the end of the book titled ‘Enhancing Your Enjoyment of Poetry’ where Rachel Kelly provides ideas around reading, memorising and writing poetry and then ‘selecting individual inspiring lines of poetry’. The reading poetry section states, ‘Start with the belief that poems can be a source of wisdom and beauty, open to anybody. Look at them as simply a way individuals have found to better convey moods and feelings that, can sometimes be so hard to pin down or find the right words for.’ She also goes on to mention that due to the way some poems are worded, they can be like reading a song. Again, this is something I really feel with poetry. Songs and music have the ability to make me emotional and I find that the poems I enjoy the most are those I can almost read and imagine them being sung. The short section around writing poetry encourages the reader to try poetry as a way to express feelings and emotions. Right now it’s ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver. I change what I find the most compelling poem in the book according to my mood. But Oliver really speaks to me right now. Here’s the poem, and below I’ve written about why I love it so much and why I turn to it in times of trouble. The intimacy between poet and reader is further heightened in Oliver’s promise that from now on we will trust each other sufficiently to open up, as we are equal in our humanity and our despair. ‘Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine’ shows how fiercely the poet wants to connect with her reader: this is the heart of the poem’s power – we are loving creatures, says Oliver.

Are we going to have to radically reappraise how we approach mental wellbeing more broadly, given that the level of demand raises the possibility of the NHS never being able to solve the growing mental health crisis?Mental health campaigner and journalist Rachel Kelly has published a new book You"ll Never Walk Alone If the thought of writing daunts you. Don’t think about it as being good or bad. Instead, write straight from the heart: writing for wellbeing is as much about how you feel as the words you choose and the images they suggest. The new book is You”ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Down. It is a selection of poems and writing, prefaced by Kelly’s thoughts on why she chose to include each one. The range is broad, from Sappho through Keats and Wordsworth to Mary Oliver and Derek Walcott, the author of her favourite poem in the book, Love. Poetry can be like a salve to the soul if you find just the right one to read in the right set of circumstances. This inspirational and soothing collection, organised according to the season, not only provides great comfort but acts as a friend, too, when there are times to celebrate. As the title suggests, you'll never walk alone when you have this trusty companion by your bedside. -- My Weekly This new understanding naturally leads to different answers to the psychological problems. We need a two-pronged approach, and neither answer is about supplying more medical help or more demands on the NHS. The first applies to all of us; the second is more targeted.