Following in the hallowed footsteps of Milton, who wrote in 1671 that “apt words have power to swage / The tumours of a troubled mind / And are as balm to festered wounds”, the poet Deborah Alma is preparing to open the UK’s first poetry pharmacy. Here, instead of sleeping pills and multivitamins, customers will be offered prescriptions of Derek Walcott and Elizabeth Bishop.
Alma, who as the “Emergency Poet” has prescribed poems as cures from the back of a 1970s ambulance for the last six years, is now setting up a permanent outlet in a shop at Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire. An old Edwardian ironmonger’s, it still has the original fixtures and fittings, and, together with her partner, the TS Eliot prize-shortlisted poet James Sheard, Alma is preparing to turn it into a haven “to help ease a variety of maladies with the soothing therapy of Poetry”.
Dressed in a white coat and stethoscope, Alma says she was invited to appear as the Emergency Poet at “schools, hospitals and festivals all over the place, but I’m a middle-aged woman and I’m getting a bit old for driving around”. She first noticed the shop on Bishop’s Castle High Street two years ago. “It’s got all the original shelves, drawers, the oak counter; it’s beautiful and I thought: ‘Wow, that would make a fantastic poetry pharmacy!’ Two years later, we’ve done it and got a mortgage,” she says.
The mortgage was approved on Wednesday, and Alma is buzzing with plans for how the shop will be divided like a pharmacy “into areas for particular ailments, so you walk around and find wherever your mood might be addressed by literature”. The sections will be set up along the lines of a poetry anthology she edited in 2016, The Everyday Poet, which was split into poems “addressing areas of emotional need” such as love, ageing, grief and hope. There will also be a children’s section, a consulting room, a cafe, and a large space for writing retreats, workshops and performances.
With a report earlier this week showing that poetry sales were up by more than 12% in 2018, driven largely by younger buyers, Alma suggests poetry is filling the gap left by religion.
“I think probably more than any other art it speaks directly as though from one person to another,” says Alma, who published her own first collection, Dirty Laundry, last year. “It’s intimate and it’s empathetic. It can be a prayer or a curse, or something just to hang on to.”
Alma is reluctant to hand out general poetry prescriptions on demand, as she says each “patient” needs a proper consultation before being given a poem, but she will advise that for a broken heart, Derek Walcott’s Love After Love is “always a good one, about falling in love with your own interesting life”. Grief “depends on what the loss is, and that’s complicated”, but she would probably reach for “something about letting go”, possibly the Elizabeth Bishop poem, One Art.
And for the increasing issue of internet addiction? “The poem that comes to mind is Miroslav Holub’s The Door … It’s about experiencing things for their own sake,” she says.
