POETRY COLLECTIONS

A TIME of “comfort and joy” doesn’t always deliver either, which is why some people (more than one might expect) turn to poetry for consolation and confirmation. You may ask why that is the case. It is because many discover that our longings are universal, and our pain is not unique. A poetry book can be a gift of healing.

Rachel Kelly’s anthology You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems For Life’s Ups And Downs (published by Yellow Kite), is the perfect guide. A true evangelist for poetry as an aid to emotional wellbeing, the mental health campaigner begins, “Words can be a way to make sense of our feelings”. She divides her choices into the four seasons – representing moods of sadness, hope, joy and reflection. The range is engaging, offering old favourites such as Keats and Derek Walcott, as well as songs and new writers.

Kelly follows each poem with a beautifully concise explanation which will be welcomed by anyone unaccustomed to reading poetry. Fresh delight is also brought to those who encounter familiar poems anew. The whole book is an essential companion.

Padraig O Tuama has a similar idea with his anthology Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems To Open Your World (published by Canongate). His choices are “sometimes exploring common ground, sometimes not”, and are drawn from a very wide range of nationalities and cultures.

Based on the popular podcast of the same name, this collection is more for the experienced poetry lover, although O Tuama’s expansive and deeply personal essays about each poem are very helpful. As he explains, “The poems have become like friends I turn to and return to.”

He doesn’t really structure his choices and most of the poems offered will not be familiar. It is a journey of discovery; an anthology that provides a challenge on every page as well as a wealth of frank autobiographical material from the Irish poet, teacher and theologian.

Either of these books is a gift from all the poets to each individual reader. They reassure us that there is nothing strange in our feelings, and that joy can flicker when you are least expecting it.

Book Review and Synopsis – Berlin by Sinclair McKay (published by Viking, 464pp)

IF THERE was a focal point for the history of the twentieth century, then Berlin was it. The city had a central role in all of the country’s defining conflicts: both World Wars and the Cold War. Its citizens endured, in the words of Sinclair McKay, “an unending series of revolutions, a maelstrom of turmoil and insecurity”. And yet it survives.

It didn’t look that way in 1945 as Allied bombs reduced it to rubble and Soviet soldiers raped, slaughtered and pillaged, exacting revenge on the ordinary people of Hitler’s Germany for their years of complicity.

With unburied bodies strewn through its streets and mass suicides by Berliners who saw no future for themselves, its fate seemed to encapsulate “all the nihilist horror of that sad century – mass death without meaning on an unimaginable scale”.

And then, split in two, it became the pressure point for a new confrontation between Moscow and the West. If the world was going to end with a bang, the first sparks might well be here.

McKay, a stylish and elegant writer, tells all this with great panache and understanding, his research extensive, and his observations profound.