Description
By Andrew Aldred
ISBN: 9781783823758
Published: 2017
Pages: 51
Key Themes: Mental Health, Mental Illness, Paranoid Schizophrenia
Description
This book contains a blend of poems I hope you will be interested in. It includes poems about cancer, which I was diagnosed with last year, politics in Britain, Europe and America, urban life, acts of terrorism, and growing older. I hope you enjoy it. I am an ex-soldier with a thirty year history of mental illness and a multiple diagnosis, who has served time in prison and secure mental hospital. I live in North Manchester.
About the Author
I have been in Mental Health Services since 1985, when I had a huge mental breakdown after serving in the Falklands with the army. Since then my life has been something of a rollercoaster of mental illness until meeting my wife Jane seven years ago.
I have been in and out of hospital from 1985 until 2009. I had an illness which I attributed to my father and resulted in me stabbing him in 1997 and going to the Edenfield Unit in Prestwich Hospital for 6 years. This is when I started to write poetry to keep myself sane and give me something to focus on.
Book Extract
Keeping Afloat
We’re trying to keep each other afloat
But we’re both beginning to tire
Thirty years of mental illness apiece
Her recent pneumonia and heart attack
And my diagnosis of throat cancer
The alcohol problem that resulted in our divorce
As soon as we’ve solved one problem
There’s another two or three to take its place
Life’s hard and relentless
We’ve still got each other
Our parents are refusing to die
And we’re just as stubborn
But we’re all in deep water
And none of us will float forever
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