A Poetry Pharmacy Is Born in the UK

Alison Flood writes for The Guardian about poet Deborah Alma's poetry pharmacy, where, "instead of sleeping pills and multivitamins, customers will be offered prescriptions of Derek Walcott and Elizabeth Bishop." Alma is planning to open her outlet in a shop at Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire. More:

...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 full article is at The Guardian.