Poetry Prescription: Words for Love

by Deborah Alma

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.


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


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.

Genres: Poetry

60 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 23, 2025

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another beautifully curated selection of poet, practical and digestible. Love is the title, but it is passion, loss, unrequited, love of parents, friends, children. All sectioned up very neatly.

[Libby Gwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful little collection of poems ✨️

[Jack Duggan · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with any collection, a bit of a mixed bag. It wouldn’t be fair to rate based on how much I liked or didn’t like the poems themselves, but I can at least critique the compiling.

I did like quite a few of the poems here, there’s enough variety in tone, style and subject matter that there’s bound to be something for everyone even if most of it isn’t your cup of tea. Not limiting ‘Love’ to just romantic love was a good idea, so the inclusions of familial love, grief, and break-ups was rewarding. I also like the through-line in how they are compiled - it starts out very wholesome with new love, and over the course shifts as love might throughout one’s life, so it flows nicely.

For a collection of only about 50 poems though, it feels a little like this was taking the easy way out at times. While I understand that not everybody has massive poetry libraries (including me) some of the poems collected - Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43, and (inexplicably) Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night - are so ubiquitous that including feels like trying to pad the page count.

Similarly, the whole collection including introductions and blank pages is only just over 60 pages, so repeating authors (including Shakespeare, again) when there are so many poets out there, feels a little like the compiler was working to a deadline or only had a very small library to collate from.

In summary, not a bad collection by any means, but as someone who doesn’t really buy poetry this hasn’t swayed me much into changing that.

[Olivia Caple · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok… so this is my first official reading of a poetry book outside of education and I have mixed feelings. I have no idea how to review this because some of them I loved but others I didn’t care for. I feel like unless I properly annotate each poem I just go through them and don’t read them how they are meant to be read. Nonetheless, I will continue to read poetry books because it is a nice change of reading pace. I shall include my favourite poem in the book below for you to enjoy…🩷

‘Love and Friendship’
by Emily Brontë

Love is like the wild rose-briar,
Friendship like the holly-tree—
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
But which will bloom most constantly?

The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air;
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who will call the wild-briar fair?

Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now
And deck thee with the holly’s sheen,
That when December blights thy brow
He still may leave thy garland green.

[jolovesbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the Poetry Pharmacy, a space you can visit to find poetry that will speak to whatever emotion or experience you seek to address. This collection was compiled by one of the co-founders.

Inside you'll find poems about all different types of love, including wanting love, crushes and the ache of what could be, modern love, love late in life, the excitement of new love, the tentativeness of new love, heartbreak, loneliness without love, moving on from love, romantic love, cosy love, family love, the sacrifices made for love, showing love through acts and not words... It feels apt that I bought this on a lovely day out that I took myself on (self love and care 🥰)

I love how poetry contains and stirs up so much feeling in so few words. Here are some of my favourites (the last my absolute fave):


How the World Gets Bigger
'... I walk the christened pavement, cherry tree
hung like a chandelier, the corner at the end
of the road suddenly appealing, the way it
turns without revealing what lies beyond.'
Alyson Hallet


Meeting the Light Completely
'Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognised stranger...'
Jane Hirshfield


The Present
'For the present there is just one moon,
though every level pond gives back another.

But the bright disc shining in the black lagoon,
perceived by astrophysicist and lover,

is milliseconds old. And even that light's
seven minutes older than its source.

And the stars we think we see on moonless nights
are long extinguished. And, of course,

this very moment, as you read this line,
is literally gone before you know it.

Forget the here-and-now. We have no time
but this device of wantonness and wit.

Make me this present then: your hand in mine,
and we'll live out our lives in it.'
Michael Donaghy


The Light Beneath
'...Friends ask how she copes with his dour silence.
She could tell them how he’s got up first for thirty years
to make the coffee, how he’s always folded
his warm legs around her feet on winter nights,
how the first blooms of summer are cut for the kitchen
table before she knows they exist. She couldn’t explain
how once, when she was ill, she woke to find him
watching over her, hollow faced.'
Angela France


Huge Blue
'... I hope your huge blue
is beautiful with stars
as you leap, eyes wide open,
no ghost of me on your back.'
Pippa Little


Flight
'We breathe into sleep, the low rumble of rain on the roof,
the soft pulse of blood lullabying us.
Floor boards in our emptied house creak half-heard,
and I sink
into the hinterland, neither here nor there.

I wake to the thud of the newspaper, the gurgle of the heating.
I lie for a while. Half-remembered dreams scutter
back into the dark but the taste of them lingers
like salt on my tongue.

You are still sleeping so I creep down the stairs,
silence the kettle before it alarms you.
I hold the mug in my hands,
let it warm them.

I watch two summer-fat blackbirds breakfast on berries,
stripping the tree, whilst in the leaves,
a shoal of sparrows
dart and flash.

The dog races across morning -wet grass, high-fiving the day
he barks and dances a circle. The birds scatter
at the sound of him. I shield my eyes
as I watch them fly.'
Lisa Oliver


Washing my mother's hair
'She's bird-thin,
fragile as her brittle smile,
her teeth suddenly too big for her mouth
lips thinned, clumsy with Vaseline
to stop the cracks showing.

Only last summer she broke
the world record in Running For The Bus
carrier bags thumping at her varicose legs
then fanned herself with the Radio Times
all the fifteen stops home.

Now her spine is hooked
into a question mark
from which her head tries to look up.
She doesn't have to bend at all to get her hair
into the wash-basin.

For the first time in my life,
and hers, I pour the warm water,
the baby shampoo, the best conditioner I could buy,
rub the blushing whiteness of her scalp gently
while she holds her flannel

clamped to her eyes like she taught me to.
And she says Oh that's lovely. Just what I need.
That's right, give it a good rub. Oh that's just lovely.
Sure and I'll be a new woman.
And I rub and chat quietly

and joke with her in a put-on voice:
Has Madam done her numbers for the lottery yet?
and Will it be Torremolinos again this year, Madam?
and the other things that mind-numbed hairdressers
say to their ladies.

And nothing at all
about how much
I love her. '
Char March

[4S · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy poetry passively but this was the first poetry collection I bought as a book to keep. I believe emotions can be best processed through your own and other's experiences so poetry provides the perfect vague raw method to do so. This collection is really well put together and covers love in all forms and it is very beautiful. I can see myself picking this up again in the future.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poetry prescription series allow readers to pick up poems around a certain theme or emotion. This one on words for love gave me an intro to past and present day poets mostly from the US and Europe. Easy to pick up and read depending on your mood.

[🌶 peppersocks 🧦 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reflections and lessons learned/the content of this book made me feel…

…filled with thoughts on all types of love 🧡

[Carlyn (The Bookworm Mum) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sweet little collection.

[Em · Rating 5 out of 5]

my bf gave me it for my graduation gift and I loved it!