What’s the cure for a broken heart? What about for grief, anxiety or loneliness? For those visiting the Poetry Pharmacy – customers or patients, depending how you see them – it’s these questions that are on their minds. The company’s new London bookshop, on Oxford Street, offers tonics to those sorts of emotional ailments. Calm, comfort, inspiration: whatever you’re searching for, there’s a book of poetry, philosophy or psychology to help you find it.
From the metaphysical poets to the romantics, poetry has long had the ability to speak to parts of our soul. When prose fails, often only verse has the answer, says Poetry Pharmacy founder Deb Alma. “At weddings and funerals, it’s a poem that’s read,” she points out. “It’s the art that people in states of heightened emotion turn to.”
Under the UK educational system, poetry is treated as something to be carefully dissected rather than enjoyed, often pushing teenagers to become either angsty teenage poets themselves or full-on haters of the stuff. But over the last decade, this has changed rapidly. Thanks to the birth of so-called ‘instapoetry’, popularised by Rupi Kaur and her bestselling 2014 collection milk & honey, young people are reading poetry again.
Writers like Hollie McNish and Mercury prize nominee Kae Tempest have become rock stars of the genre. Even singer Lana Del Rey has released her own collection. Last year – thanks to the continued success of instapoetry and a revolutionary new translation of Homer – marked the highest sales of poetry since accurate records began.
