Poetry Prescription: Words for Love

by Deborah Alma (editor)

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 70
Series: Poetry Prescriptions
Rating:

Synopsis:

This beautiful pocket-sized hardback gift book contains carefully curated prescriptions in verse compiled by Deborah Alma, the founder of the Poetry Pharmacy. Life is lived with feeling - these poems look at all the many manifestations of love.

For All Matters of the Heart -Stimulants for Romantic Love, Panaceas for the Broken-Hearted; for the Appreciation of Fellowship, Family and for the Promotion of Tenderness.

Includes poems by W. B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, Edna St Vincent Millay, D. H. Lawrence and many more.

• No bitter pills
• No adverse reactions

The Poetry Prescription series compiled by Deborah Alma is the perfect antidote for life’s ailments. Inspired by the achingly cool Poetry Pharmacy shops in London and Shropshire - social media favourites with a clear focus on promoting wellbeing through the written and spoken word. Each of the eight themed titles offers an array of poems to inspire, heal and comfort. Whether you are looking to find solace for times of ill-health, loss and grief, cope with matters of the heart, need poetic inspiration for courage and confidence, or want to find peace and tranquillity in wild spaces, there is a collection for everyone.

Perfect for reading aloud or for quiet contemplation, these books are a much needed balm for our busy lives.

I love the idea of the “Poetry Prescription” books, selections of poems for given moods and needs which promise no bitter pills, nothing hard to swallow, just poetry suitable for the moment. I don’t know if all of them have the same editor, but Words for Love was edited by Deborah Alma, and it’s an interesting selection.

Many of them are, to me at least, expected inclusions: your Keats, Rosetti and Shakespeare. There are also poets I didn’t know, or poems I didn’t know by poets I did know, and I’d kind of hoped for more of those — but it makes for an accessible volume if you’re not a big poetry reader. I wouldn’t have picked that Duffy poem, of all her options, but at least it was from Rapture, which is my favourite of her collections.

The collection offers a small section for new love, one for grief, one for familial love, that kind of division. It’s all quite nice as a concept, and I might pick up others in the series for the introductions to different poets I might not have known.

Rating: 3/5