The Poetry Pharmacy: Tried-and-True Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind and Soul

Product Information

The final session is a collective celebration. We’ll share the fruits of our new habits, and marvel at just how many different ways our group have found to bring more poetry into both our own and others’ daily lives. It was Ambulances by Philip Larkin. I had this extraordinary experience. I was about to cross the road when someone stepped in front of me and was hit by a car. I found myself pumping his heart, giving him the kiss of life – amazingly, his heart started beating again. An ambulance came, the police took my statement. One of his favourite poems is not something that would fit a prescription, however. “Something I hold dear is Aubade by Phillip Larkin – it was written quite late in his life, and it’s about lying awake at night and being frightened of dying. He manages to hold onto the thoughts we’re most scared of, and develop them and explore them – most of us just want to push them aside,” says Sieghart. “It’s bold, it’s stark, it’s straight to it – and it’s a fantastically moving poem. Whenever I read that at a reading, it stuns and silences the room.”

Then all the small securities you built about your house, your desk, your calendar are blown like straws; and momentarily, as if a scent of ivy or the earth had opened up a childhood door, you pause, They’re delighted. It was a shop at the top of the high street that had been closed down for 13 years, and it had become almost like an emblem of this little place with its shut-down shops. We have events here every weekend, and there’s a little coffee shop. It’s comfortable. People can sit and read and talk to each other, without feeling rushed. And they’ve been really supportive. We even have couple of volunteers who are helping out, because they want it to succeed. So why poetry, for you?I was given an honorary title by the editor-in-chief a couple of weeks ago: i’s Poet in Residence. It came after a few weeks bombarding him and other colleagues daily with poems that I like. The Forward Book of Poetry 2020 brings together a selection of the best poetry published in the British Isles over the last year, including the winners of the 2019 Forward Prizes – and a foreword by jury chair Shahidha Bari. The book is divided into five sections: Mental and Emotional Well-Being, Motivations, Self-Image and Self-Acceptance, The World and Other People, and Love and Loss. The divisions, for me, were a distraction but not a reduction since you can read them once as I did, many times or not at all. Not so with the seventy-four conditions, each of which is printed above its poem.

Sieghart chaired and authored An Independent Review of E-Lending in Public Libraries in England [8] published by Department Culture, Media and Sport, 2013 and was subsequently jointly commissioned by Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, DCMS, and Brandon Lewis, Minister for Communities & Local Government, DCLG, to consider and report on Public Library services in England. The "Independent Library report for England" [9] was published by DCMS in December 2014. In September 2015, Sieghart was appointed Chairman of Somerset House Trust.Take a walk through the countryside. Oswestry is surrounded by beautiful countryside, perfect for a leisurely autumn stroll. Be sure to visit Nesscliffe Hill for stunning views of the countryside.

The essential thing when thinking about a life cut short is not to imagine it as an oak sapling, cut before its prime. Those we lost were never meant to be grand old trees at all. Instead, they lived their days bright and treasured; they bloomed before they fell, and that was enough. Their lives were beautiful, and whole, and perfect, like a flower on a summer’s day. They are gone now, but their memory remains with us, a source of light. It will never be extinguished.

‘The idea has struck a chord’

There’s a skill to creating spaces where people feel really comfortable, and it’s one Alma seems to possess in abundance. You see photographs of her shop and you just want to be in there, reading a good book in the cosy café while sipping a nice cup of Tea (S Eliot) along with a piece of Philip Parkin cake. The world has reopened and so has the Poetry Pharmacy: the powerful final instalment in the hugely beloved series