Poetry is intensely valuable to me and it always has been. It is my antidote to despair, tiredness and loneliness; a thread that runs through my life. I solve problems with its lines—not just their lexicon, but the life breathed into form by rhythm, rhyme or meter: a riddle; a moment of joy. It is my borrowed voice.

A favourite is Louis MacNeice’s ‘Meeting Point‘, which I have always thought was a magisterial coming together of the ordinary and the the extraordinary; of quotidian rhythm and something magical. When I read this poem, I am caught up by its concept of the loved ones part of, yet isolated in happiness from the world; they are separate while they participate in daily activity. Something absorbing, supernatural and cosmic happens in the poem. And it is transporting.

So, if you feel sad or if you find anxiety about your daily life is skewing your experience of the beauty around you, anchoring yourself in a poem might help. Is there, beyond or daily our even bland experience, something extraordinary and connecting us to a myriad things? You’ll see that ‘God or whatever means the Good‘ is a phrase used. For you, faith may be about your place of worship; here the notion is broader. It is there, just not grasped; and so you might find something in this poem to cheer you and give you solace. It’s about the transformative power of love, too—its possibilities and the idea of time being suspended. I think we may feel this in love, but also in finding something that absorbs us, whatever that is. And that is truly valuable.

As for the structure of the poem: how might that make you feel better? I mean in any poem. The words lean on and support one another; they are interlocked in their sense and in their rhythm and this busy, subtle action draws forth, I might say, a music whose melody and beat speak to us and delight us. So read a poem aloud and test it on your pulse. What does it do to you? For me, the ‘time was away‘ refrain in the MacNeice poem of which I spoke, is comforting in its repetition, both of words but also of rhythm. You don’t need to know about metrical feet to hear this and feel it.

Here’s an idea. Learn the poem. Learn any poem. By heart. Then, when you feel your mood slump or you feel scared, pull it out and hear it in your head, mouth it quietly, or say it loudly and clearly.

It’s not that a poem is a talisman, but why not let it be an anchor? Every time you encounter it, you might see something new or notice you read it or say it slightly differently.

We are busy—so very busy nowadays; we are assailed by the images that tell us how flawed we are; a steady stream of information is constantly with us through digital media and I might argue that we have more, yet often we have less because we refuse to accept that difficulty and frustration are normal or to aim less for getting and achieving and more at being? It is not coincidence that we see a rise in the understanding and use of mindfulness techniques, as we aim to be stilled and in the moment.

But these are not new techniques, but refinements of much, much older ones and I think that reading a poem can be part of that. Why not be swept away by Porphyro’s extraordinary feast in Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes‘? Find yourself utterly absorbed by epic simile and astonishing breadth of imagery and allusion in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost‘? The middle English of Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales‘ is not as difficult as people may think to read and, in trying, a whole new world comes to a life. As it touches us, might we feel less alone in a world where we are often always ‘on’ and yet potentially more isolated?

Sometimes, we create in lines of poetry a little room – a world, even. For example, not long ago, I worked with a rather sad boy in the final year of GCSE. We tore up what we were doing and I watched his mood shift and his eyes go wide as we explored T.S. Eliot’s ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats‘. He became relaxed; lively—enjoying the characterisation and the jolly repetition.

I do believe—and studies bear this out—that we are seeing children and adolescents bowed down under stress from all angles and suffering more from mental health problems. Sometimes, I work with students who have had enough of schooling and see little hope for the future. I am not their counsellor, but I am happy to try and offer up some poetry to cheer them. It’s the rhyme and the rhythm that strike home. Like soothing stories for an older ear, no longer read to or quietened at bedtime by song or nursery rhyme. And an awareness, young or old, that poetry, as Dylan Thomas had it, ‘ is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.’

Poetry is always there; always important. For a challenge for us or a challenge to the status quo; to bring us joy or relaxation; it is that cordial handshake which brings with it words to surprise, delight and chronicle. It will always have its place and always be important. And maybe, as Shelley had it, poets are, after all, ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

Mother’s Day

Two years ago I wrote my dead mother a letter. It was poetical, but promised murder; ironically, she was already dead and hated poetry for its teasing impulse of hope. That hope had died within in in her prime.

I have had a good deal of mental health problems. A colourful time. I have battled, but not beaten (though read on) and, for as long as I can remember, I have been prone to unrelenting dark moods; anxiety has, not infrequently, kept me secluded and apart. I have been a chronic self-harmer, tried to control the vagaries of a messy world with routine and ritual, twice tried to take my own life. On the first occasion, my mother found me, but refused to take me to hospital. That was a seminal moment. I was fourteen, the age of my eldest son now. I thought, ‘Maybe she doesn’t understand.’ But later I thought, ‘Maybe she just wanted me to die?’ It was hard to feel safe or loved after that, but then I am not sure that I knew what these things meant—so I describe that feeling only with the benefit of hindsight and because, as a mother myself, I feel so sad for my child-self.

In the end, I got the help I needed. Two years ago—and I am in my forties now, a mother of three young ones—I had CAT (Cognitive Analytic Therapy) on the NHS. It changed how I saw myself, my life and my past in profound terms. And it had homework. I am a swot, so I liked that. Ah, not easy homework. Letters to the therapist and, more pertinently to this piece, letters to my dead mother and assorted other folk whose influence weighed heavily and unpleasantly on me as I swam in a sort of viscous, black water. But I got out. CAT helped me to see the world in a brighter, fresher way; to live unladen by enervating memory: to get away from careering but very dead relatives. Writing to my mother was a part of that. I could have written a book on her. Actually, I just did, but back to the moment. I had some things to say and also I had to make a stand and confine her to my past. I would say I am ninety percent there.

My mother has been dead for twenty five years. I might say she’s caused more trouble post mortem than when she was alive and kicking. I can hear her now, as I write this. It’s a sort of hoarse chuckling. She wouldn’t have to use actual words, for just a look would do. For a tiny Welsh lady with multiple health problems, she kicked a lot. And to me, tiny was Goliath. But we know what happened to him. To the outside world she was brilliant. A tiny pretty Welsh woman, full of resources and craft; a tub thumper, campaigner. A respected pillar of the community to whom I may owe my campaigning tendencies. She was too clever for the life in which she found herself and thus was chronically frustrated. Responsibilities and poor health meant she couldn’t get out. I think she swam as best she could through a vast sea of might have beens—such as how her life might have been, on fire with passion and tremendous achievement, had she not been compromised by a weak heart and the attendant illness that visited. And I was another might have been; had I not existed—had she not kept me, the baby who further compromised her physical and emotional reserves, things might have been different. She could have been steadier and able to spread her wings. So when she told me how I had weakened her, I believed her. It is hard not to, still.

Yet, my mother made constant references to how she was strong and I was weak. It should have been the other way round; ironically, it was not because, apparently, I was the child of no good quality or just desire. I think the deathly low moods to which I became accustomed and against which I periodically lost the will to fight visited me at an early age because I became convinced, mixed up with earliest memoires, that I was a scabrous wound, pick, pick picked away. A shouldn’t have been which brought on the ghastly might have beens. I tried to tell her how I felt when I was a little older when she declaimed, as she often did, that I was trial and burden to all around me. Then, she pulled my hair and my ear and said, like a whirlwind of curses, ‘You feel? Everything is all about you. You little bitch! You will dance on my grave after you’ve put me in it.’ We were folding sheets to put in the airing cupboard when she said that. It’s like it was yesterday, the screeches over the laundry-day diligence. A life replete with incongruity. And there was no-one to tell, for she was a middle-class pillar of the community; of good name and standing. So it had to be me, didn’t it? Here was one of the worst things she would say to me. I find it hard to write this even now:

‘Little bitch. You will dance on my grave after you have put me in it. And we ALL know what you’re like!’

It must have been true. She couldn’t empathise with me because I was a nasty little eldritch child. Credence of this followed soon, each time. The doorbell rang. It was the vicar:

‘Oh Mrs Llewellyn, you were so kind to send flowers to my wife when she so poorly and you were so kind to read the closing prayer at Mrs Mobbs’s funeral.’

And the phone rang: ‘Oh Mrs Llewellyn, you have done so much to change the face of this struggling school. You are an inspiration to all teachers and, in fact, to all members of the community.’

And a letter came from the letter box: ‘From Greenham Common: Oh Mrs Llewellyn, it was so kind of you to send us so many cakes and all those beautiful knitted socks and gloves because we protesters don’t half get cold and hungry and it’s people like you who keep us going.’

So I carved out my name with self loathing on my skin; hit my head with my fists until the ringing in my ears made me feel a little less alone. It had to be me, me, me because it just had to be. How could it be her? Just look at how marvellous she was! And as a response to stress and anxiety, the self harming stayed for over twenty years. If someone didn’t like me, or someone disapproved of me or said the dreaded words, ‘Oh we ALL know what you’re like’, I scratched it on my own skin because those were, for me, prompts for a sort of annihilation. I say, a sort, because there was always more laundry to be done afterwards.

And still I tried to talk to her.

‘Mummy, I feel so sad!’

Ah, it was all the words of the pitiful, self-indulgent creature. She told me flatly that depression, adolescence or even moods didn’t exist. These were phrases invented by those who peddled what she called ‘Psycho-babble.’ She kept out books for me to see—Dealing with Exceptionally difficult Kids. Is your Child a Monster? Strategies to Cope. Are You a Saint who Birthed a Sinner? They were left out like coffee table books. Her anger was palpable, but denied. She was too pure, too good to be angry. I was the little canker. When her friends came round, she stuffed the books in the cupboard and put out ‘Country Living’ while she and her harping porcelain doll-faced friends (as I saw them in childhood) drank tea and compared martyrdoms.

I believe that my mother was unable to have a strenuous conversation with my father, who was bright but not in her league and possibly not aware that he wasn’t. I used to hear them arguing: ‘Books, opera, you never take me anywhere, I am so bored, bored, bored, I am practically dead.’. Then my father would go and have a burn. The bonfires he always started when indecision, conflict or any sort of hiatus beckoned. He was a good man, but I don’t feel I knew him at all. He was tall and strong and his shoulders like Atlas, but he was weaker than his wife and he would acquiesce when she left a hairball from her daughter on the carpet. He loved her and didn’t want to upset her and also he had to get ready for Evensong because he was a lay preacher and had responsibilities.

Mother’s Day. I cry.

What do I think? I think I miss her ever day and I will never stop. I learned about determination, persistence and campaigning from her. I don’t know whether she believed we had a soul, but she believed in intellect; in using it, deploying it: allowing it to take flight and to animate us. I think she was brilliant. I imbibed so much from her, I feel such sympathy for her because her life could have been so different. I think illness turned to spite and I was an unplanned child she had the heart and gall to keep. As she constantly told me. I wonder if she had vicarious hopes for me; that I would do the things she wouldn’t be able to and yet that was wound up with her own bitterness. Perhaps, as adults, we could have resolved this and got along, healed and communing. I will never know. Not to have had a friendship with her as an adult upsets me, still. Because despite everything that had happened, we had potential.

Did she love me? I think in her own way. Did she want me? I think she hadn’t, but loved me against her will and grew to hate me too. The last time I ever saw her, she had been refusing to speak to me for days. I didn’t know why. She wouldn’t say. That was the punishment. I saw her on a railway platform. I was still waving when she turned away. I never saw her again and I thought that if I saw her dead body I would die too. Yes—I loved her with passion; she loved with spite and flame. It was complicated. Part of me hated her because each day brought with it a fresh knowledge of what a trial and a burden I had been; of the baby that should have been left in the bucket (hence the phrase ‘Baby in the Bucket’ that I used in Killing Hapless Ally) and who had better atone for having been allowed to survive. I internalised that and I can feel tears pricking my eyes and that my fingers are clammy with a little anxiety as I write this. The hoarse chuckling is there, just at my back. As I said, post mortem, she’s still giving me some trouble.

Now, I have three boys of my own to mother; I do my best; I try; I fail; I try again; I ‘fail better’—as Samuel Beckett’s phrase has it. Sometimes, I even succeed. Through it all, I’d be lying if I said my experiences of parenting don’t regularly evoke the melancholy of being parented myself. But at least now, I have the wherewithal to challenge that brooding, for which I have the support of MHRS (Mental Health Rescue Service) to thank. The depression, the OCD which I developed as an attempt to fashion a bewildering world and hold it in my hand with ritual, order and lines of books repeated over and over until I thought, ‘Safe?’; the stalling anxiety; the self loathing and self-harming and the times I tried to destroy my own life: at the heart of all that, a fiery sense that I should not be and everybody knew. I would have to say that it began with her.

Ah, but there’s more to it than that. I’ve forgiven her, written the letter to her as part of the Cognitive Analytic Therapy a hugely skilled team laid on for me. And I put it all down and consigned her to my past. I feel so sorry that she despised hope for the lie it gave her, but I don’t want her to visit and she had to go—at least, to go from me. But love is a many-winged creature and in my letter I also wrote this:

‘And you were my jagged pointing monster, but I loved you Mummy. I loved you. I couldn’t help it. I still love you. And I want you. And I miss you every day and I will never stop.’

Happy Mother’s Day and I think of you always.

I love you, mum. Anna x