02/03/2025- And you have come into the world to do this...

In which our poetry pharmacists celebrate the poems and professionals that restore us...

Welcome to the Poetry Pharmacy's newsletter! Here you will find upcoming events, new and featured books, poems, prescriptions, and panaceas.

Let the beauty we love be what we do
- There are hundreds of ways to
Kneel and kiss the ground

Rumi

Poetic Remedies to Lift the Spirits

Salve for the Soul; for Resistance to Burnout & the Promotion of a Hopeful and Healed Future

This week in the UK, the sun has been shining brightly, offering a hopeful glimpse of the upcoming spring, setting the perfect scene for this week’s exciting news: the launch of our poetic medicine, Restore.

This restorative is perfect salve for the soul; Restore is the go-to poetry prescription to apply a healthy dose of self-care for anyone in need of rest, restoration and recuperation. This is a wonderful collaboration with Dr Katie Amiel one of the ambassadors for the worthwhile and necessary charity Doctors in Distress.

At the Poetry Pharmacy we recognise that our NHS healthcare workers are at the heart of our health and its restoration. Chief Poetry Pharmacist Deb Alma celebrated the launch of this fundraising collaboration on Friday at our Oxford Street bookshop. Helping us celebrate with the Doctors in Distress team, were a cast of NHS luminaries, poets and friends of the Poetry Pharmacy. If you're interested you can see some photos from the launch party on our Instagram here. 50% from the sale of every bottle will go to charity Doctors in Distress, which aims to provide crucial mental health support for healthcare workers, particularly in the prevention of suicide.

You can buy Restore poetry pills from our online shop and from both our bookshops. Thank you so much for your support. It means a lot.

Coming Up This Week

The healing power of poetry is the heart of the Poetry Pharmacy, and we continue to celebrate and promote its creative prowess as our enterprise grows. Our business has been crafted around the recognition that the power of poetry enriches our personal and professional lives. Sharing poetry is what brought about an impromptu business relationship between Mark Constantine and Poetry Pharmacy’s founder Deb Alma, providing opportunity for personal development and changes to both the Poetry Pharmacy and Lush, with more collaborations planned.

The creative journey is mapped in the ‘Poetry Business School’, which launches Thursday 13th March and you can pre-order here...but for those who can’t wait for then, we’re giving away 3 Poetry Business School boxes which, as well as a copy of the book, include a promotional bottle of inspiring poetic medicine and a Slow Down Poetry Pharmacy/ Lush bath bomb, with an extract of poetry hidden inside it just for our newsletter subscribers. Simply email sarahholland@poetrypharmacy.co.uk with the subject line PoetryBusinessSchool by pub date of March 13th for a chance to win. Winners will be picked at random and sorry that we can't enter into any correspondence there. UK & international entries welcome. Good luck!

Poetical First Aid
For anyone in need of a little poetical emergency care, our First Aid collections offer three doses of Poetry Pills tailored to your ailment and they are perfect to leave in your own first aid cabinet to reach for instead of more traditional medicines!

The First Aid kit contains our Poetry Pill bottles Slow Down, Happy Pills and Poemcetamol.

The Be Original First Aid kit might be just the dose of confidence and creativity you need if you’re inspired by the Poetry Business School.

Comfort’ First Aid is recommended for restoration and courage, with Comfort, Joy and Hope poetry bottles.

We have these, and several more First Aid kits available at our Poetry Pharmacy online store and in our Bishop’s Castle and Oxford Street branches.

Visit our Bookshop.org page to browse the 'shelves' according to your mood and find books chosen to address a particular emotional ailment.

Further reading

We’ve got two lists of recommended titles for you this week to provide restoration and recuperation. Our Poetry First Aid stack contains anthologies for healing through hard times and is your first port of call for emergency poetical care:

Our Happiness selection might seem an odd choice in these difficult times, but these books don’t celebrate rapture or feverish delight. Mostly they remind us to capture moments of what Emily Dickinson calls “casual simplicity” – giggling irreverently during a yoga class or seeing a dragonfly land on a lake. Happiness, they seem to say, is far less complicated than we sometimes imagine:

We are reminded too, of this extract by poet Jack Gilbert :

“We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”

from Refusing Heaven

Book of the Week

These Are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS Edited by our own Deborah Alma, and London GP Dr Katie Amiel. This anthology offers a unique insight into the real experiences of the people at the heart of the NHS – from the student nurse at the start of his career to the heart surgeon on the eve of her retirement. We also hear the stories of those whose vital work is often unseen and unsung from domestic cleaning staff to sign language interpreters.

All proceeds from this book go to NHS Charities Together which supports over 135 official NHS Charities raising money for NHS hospitals, ambulance services, community and mental health services across the UK.