05/07/2025- Sit. Feast on your life.

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 and have held as the basic medicines in my poetry first aid kit. They are poems to address the wound, to act with the immediacy of an emotional band aid. Poems that address the reader directly as though from one person to another crossing the miles and the passage of time." Deb Alma 
 

We are in a time of deep uncertainty in the world, a time of transformation, and existential questioning. That creates real psychological stress—and it’s absolutely valid to feel overwhelmed. Poetry is not going to fix any of that - but we do believe that it lives somewhere between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and can teach us, how to sit with uncertainty and even to embrace it.
 

Poetry Prescriptions: First Aid - Poems as Panaceas; for Days When the World is Too Much With Us; for Immediate Reassurance and Remedies to Lift the Spirits

Our subject line this week is taken from Derek Walcott's, Love After Love. This beautiful poem is included in our new anthology Poetry Prescription First Aid. We prescribe it most often to those suffering from the horrible pain of a broken heart, but it works very well as permission for self-care and a recommendation to cultivate your own rich and flourishing life. 

''The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.''  Derek Walcott

Poet Spotlight

Derek Walcott, born on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, was a celebrated poet and playwright who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 for creating a rich body of poetry that reflects the complex interplay of African, Caribbean, and European heritage through a powerful and original voice.

Throughout his career, Walcott’s poetry and plays often grappled with themes of colonialism, cultural duality, and personal identity, using the act of writing as a means to navigate, explore, and illuminate complex emotional and historical landscapes.

You can read more about this much-loved and much missed poet on the excellent The Poetry Foundation site here. And we heartily recommend his Selected Poems.