Newsletter

Sit. Feast on your life. -5/7/25

Welcome to this week’s Poetry Pharmacy newsletter. This week, the news we're very excited about, is the publication of numbers 5 and 6 in our Poetry Prescription series- edited to match each of the broad sections of our bookshops. There's Comfort, Words for Love, Wild Remedy and Becoming, and now Inspiration and First Aid. "First Aid is an important anthology for me; they have all been a wonderful pleasure to edit -and it's been quite an intense piece of work to edit 8 books in a year; but this one is special. This little book includes the poems that I have most often prescribed over the years...

Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy's newsletter! Here you will find upcoming events, new and featured books, poems, prescriptions, and panaceas. As the warm summer evenings invite plans for garden get-togethers and barbecues, we have been reflecting on the importance of friends and family and of those closest to us. We love the poem The Table by Turkish Edip Cansever, which uses the image of a table as a metaphor for a life richly lived. On his table, are placed memories and metaphors, the real and the abstract. It’s a poem that means a great deal to to us at...

Hello! I gotta tell you about this amazing bookstore I visited. I pushed open the glass panelled door, and a smile as wide as the wingspan of a golden eagle spread over my face. I stepped over the threshold into the bookstore. The Poetry Pharmacy, in Bishop's Castle near Ludlow in Shropshire UK. The first of its kind anywhere in the world. To my left there was an apothecary cabinet stacked with small bottles, filled with capsules. On closer inspection, each one encapsulates a tiny piece...

Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy's newsletter! Here you will find upcoming events, new and featured books, poems, prescriptions, and panaceas. The chief singer of summer is the grass; it is the very voice of Earth, taking us into her confidence.Mary Webb, 1881 –1927, novelist and poet of the Shropshire hills and chronicler of the natural world. Diagnosed with Graves’ disease at twenty, Webb came to understand the restorative power of nature in a profoundly personal way. In her periods of illness and recovery, it was the fields and trees, the breeze and birdsong, that...

13/06/25- not with skin but with water

Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy's newsletter! Here you will find upcoming events, new and featured books, poems, prescriptions, and panaceas. Whether it’s a still pond at dusk or the vast pull of the sea, bodies of water offer more than their surface suggests. To swim in open water is to surrender to the natural world - a kind of immersion that soothes the nervous system, clears the mind, and often gives shape to feelings we struggle to articulate. To sit beside water is to be near something ancient and generous. It listens...

Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy's newsletter! Here you will find upcoming events, new and featured books, poems, prescriptions, and panaceas. This week we've been thinking about the value of bookshops and how they are so good at making a space or place of welcome. The Poetry Pharmacy bookshops love to do that too, and we're unusual in that we grew directly out of years of arts and community practice- Deb Alma started working with people with dementia to assist communication through poetry, and then later drove her Emergency Poet ambulance offering poetry on...

Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy's newsletter! Here you will find upcoming events, new and featured books, poems, prescriptions, and panaceas. June 1st marks one year of the Poetry Pharmacy on Oxford Street It's our first birthday in London! And what a year it’s been!When we first opened our second Poetry Pharmacy inside Lush, on the busiest shopping street in the world, we didn’t quite know what to expect. We hoped to reach new audiences and show how poetry, and reading more generally, might play a therapeutic role in troubled times, or act as...

Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy's newsletter! Here you will find upcoming events, new and featured books, poems, prescriptions, and panaceas.Garden Wildlife Week 2025At the Poetry Pharmacy, we believe that tending to our emotional selves and to each other, must go hand in hand with nurturing the natural world around us. Just as poetry can bring beauty and balance to our lives, encouraging the wildlife in our gardens offers both a refuge for people and nature to flourish. As summer approaches here in the UK, our thoughts turn to the quiet transformations unfolding in...

Welcome to this week’s Poetry Pharmacy newsletter, where words are our medicine and addressing a search for meaning is often part of the prescription. This time, we’re exploring the intersection between poetry and philosophy—two practices trying to make sense of the world. They each seek to investigate some profound questions about human existence and the world we live in. TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, is deeply philosophical in its exploration of time, memory, and the nature of existence. Drawing on both Christian mysticism and classical philosophy, Eliot reflects on the idea...

13/05/2025- Poetry Pharmacy News!

Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy newsletter! Here in our Shropshire bookshop we’re gearing up for next week’s Bishop's Castle Walking Festival, with a fresh new window display to mark the occasion painted by local artist Saffron Russell. We’re also excited to be working on a range of new collaborations and projects. Our former Lab where we cooked up our poetry prescriptions is currently being transformed into a vibrant venue for workshops and events - offering us more room and more possibilities to connect with you all! As spring deepens and the evenings grow longer, we’re filled with renewed...

Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy newsletter where in the UK, we're enjoying some beautiful May sunshine and are now settled into our new production Lab, working on lots of collaborations and looking forward to a busy Summer. We said goodbye this week to Esther Cooper-Wood who has been working with us for the last 6 months on some new designs and getting our Shropshire bookshop and coffee shop into good shape. We'll miss her, but wish her well as she sets of to work around Canada for a few months. 100...