24/05/2025- and I began to understand what the bird was saying

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

Garden Wildlife Week 2025

At 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 gardens and hedgerows. From 26 May, Garden Wildlife Week invites us to notice the more-than-human world — the creatures that depend on these green spaces — and to celebrate gardens as sanctuaries, not just for ourselves, but for the lives they shelter and protect.

Across the UK, people are encouraged to turn gardens, balconies, and window boxes into havens for birds, bees, butterflies, and hedgehogs — by planting native flowers, building ponds, or setting out bird boxes to welcome nature in. In a world that often feels heavy and uncertain, there is something hopeful about pausing, observing, and tending to the life around us.

Like gardens, poetry offers refuge in difficult times — a space to find calm, beauty and meaning. This week, perhaps take time to sow something, read something, and notice what’s blooming and buzzing nearby.

Beloved poet Mary Oliver spent much of her life walking in woods and meadows, listening to the world around her with a kind of reverent clarity. Her poems remind us that nature is not separate from us, but something we belong to. Our subject line is from her poem Such Singing in the Wild Branches, found in her book, Owls and Other Fantasies, you can read a few lines of the poem below.

''and that’s when it happened,
when I seemed to float,
to be, myself, a wing or a tree –
and I began to understand
what the bird was saying,
and the sands in the glass
stopped''

- Mary Oliver, Such Singing in the Wild Branches

The photo above was taken in the Poetry Pharmacy Physic Garden 

This Week's Prescription

For symptoms of spiritual restlessness and disconnection from the natural world, urban overwhelm, and cognitive clutter, we recommend Wild Remedy. This poetic prescription invites you to slow down, reconnect with nature, and remember your place within it. Best enjoyed outdoors or near an open window, in the morning with birdsong. Reread as often as necessary.

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things