People often ask me which condition I most often prescribe poetry for.
It's not an easy question to answer, because every person who sits down in front of me brings a completely different story. But after nearly fourteen years of prescribing poetry, and many thousands upon thousands of consultations, I have begun to notice certain patterns.
I first climbed into my poetry ambulance as the Emergency Poet in 2012 and what began as an art project slowly became my whole working life. For the next eight or nine years, prescribing poetry was what I did, week after week, with queues outside the ambulance. I travelled the country, parking outside festivals, libraries, universities, hospitals, schools, conferences, city centres and village greens, inviting people in for a consultation.
When we opened the Poetry Pharmacy, the consultations came indoors. These days, with shops to run and a growing team, I rarely have the time to prescribe as often as I once did. Becky now offers consultations from our Bishop's Castle shop and online, carrying on that tradition beautifully, and one day I'd love more of our booksellers to be able to prescribe poetry too. For now, though, it's one of those lovely ambitions waiting patiently on the back burner.
Every consultation begins in much the same way. Not with, "What's wrong?" but with curiosity.
As we talk, I scribble notes onto a consultation sheet. Just a first name, the answers to my questions and, eventually, the poems I've prescribed. I never intended to create an archive, but I've kept every one of those consultation sheets. Looking back through them now feels rather like leafing through a history of people's emotional lives.
The questions themselves often catch people by surprise because they're not about the problem that has brought them to me. I'm interested in how someone relaxes, what nourishes them, their reading habits and the small things that bring them joy. I love hearing about people at their best because somewhere in those answers is often the path back to themselves. And it is at the end of our chat that I begin looking for a poem.
Looking back through all those consultation sheets, I wasn't surprised to discover that the emotional conditions I prescribe for most often include anxiety, stress and overwhelm, uncertainty about the future, finding hope, and navigating change of some sort.
Grief, heartbreak and loneliness have always been there too, of course, but what has fascinated me over the years is not so much which emotions appear as the way they change their shape depending on the world we're living in.
When I was prescribing mainly in cities, people often came exhausted by the relentless pressures of modern life; stress and burnout and dissatisfaction with their work. Of never having enough time for themselves and feeling they simply couldn't keep up.
These days, particularly here in rural Shropshire, I hear something slightly different. People still bring their own personal sorrows, of course, but they're also carrying the weight of the wider world: climate anxiety, politics, growing divisions, and a seemingly less hopeful future for their children. There is often a sense that the ground beneath our feet has become less certain.
Perhaps that's why poetry has always mattered.
Long before there were wellbeing apps or self-help books, poets were trying to make sense of grief, fear, joy, love and hope. They remind us that someone else has stood where we're standing and somehow found the words.
People sometimes imagine that a poetry consultation is all about choosing the right poem. But the conversation is just as important as the poem. It begins with being listened to carefully by someone who is interested in who you are, not simply in what's wrong. The poem doesn't replace that conversation; it carries something of it away.
Perhaps that's why people tell me they return to their prescriptions years later. The poem isn't simply words on a page. It reminds them of being heard, and of the person they recognised in themselves during that conversation.
Deborah Alma
