Newsletter

05/08/25 - signs, music
There has long been a creative tension between spoken word poetry and the printed poem, rooted in questions of performance, permanence, and audience. Spoken word thrives in the immediacy of the live moment—it is usually rhythmic, embodied, often political, and made to be heard. The printed poem has been considered to be a moment in private, inviting reflection and re-reading. Spoken word may risk losing something vital when lifted off the stage and fixed in type, while page poetry can struggle to carry the full emotional weight without the presence of... Read more...
29/07/25- the answer is often immediate and clear
In this week's newsletter we're celebrating World Friendship Day. Established by The United Nations in 2011, the 30 July every year is a day to mark the role that friendship plays in promoting peace, bridging communities, and fostering mutual understanding between peoples and cultures.Friendship gives shape to feelings of belonging; offers refuge in the chaos of life, and affirms that we are not, in fact, alone in our ways of thinking, feeling, or being. Friendships of depth and meaning expand our perspective, stretch our capacity for empathy, and allow us to be ''therapeutically daft'' with one another; to... Read more...
22/07/2025- There's a rhythm out there
Here in the UK, schools have just broken up for the summer. For children it's a time of great excitement, a long exhale after months of early mornings, assemblies, homework, and hard work. Now begin six weeks of well-deserved rest, the promise of adventures in nature, and the kind of spacious freedom that only summer can bring.For many of us, this time of year brings a sweet nostalgia — remembering our own childhood summers, the endless light-filled days and scraped knees, and now, as parents or grandparents, watching the next generation... Read more...
12/07/2025- let time go slow as moss
Welcome to this week’s Poetry Pharmacy newsletter. On Thursday 10th July it was publication date for the latest two books in our Poetry Prescription series - First Aid and Inspiration On InspirationThere are moments—quiet, quick, or chaotic—when something shifts within us. A spark or the feeling of a sharp intake of breath. There is something miraculous brushing against the ordinary. Inspiration, from the Latin inspirare, meaning to breathe into, once implied the gods themselves were at work, whispering into our lungs the courage to create or to act.  In the Poetry Pharmacy, we see inspiration not... Read more...
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... Read more...
29/06/2025- filled with the gladness of living
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... Read more...
Maria Wood- Poetry Pharmacy Review 27/06/2025
  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... Read more...
12/06/2025- time and light are kinds of love
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... Read more...
13/06/2025- 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... Read more...
06/06/2025- I was a little tipsy on the dance
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... Read more...
30/05/2025- My heart is like a singing bird
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... Read more...
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 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... Read more...