When her mother died, Rachel Kelly found consolation in joyful poems – and learning them by heart
The album was beautiful, made of red leather with gilt-edged pages. My late mother, Linda Kelly, who was a historian and lover of the 18th century, with biographies of Sheridan, Tom Moore and Talleyrand to her name, had been given it by her mother-in-law shortly after she got married in the early 1960s. She decided it was too precious to fill with anything so prosaic as recipes or addresses. She chose instead to keep it as a commonplace book – filled largely with poetry, and with bits of prose too – and she kept it on and off until the day she died nearly four years ago. Poetry had always been an enthusiasm of hers, which meant it became an enthusiasm of mine, and is something I’ve been writing about for some time now. In 2014, I wrote a memoir called Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me – My Journey...
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