POETRY PRESCRIPTION

This poetry compilation inspired by the British bookshop Poetry Pharmacy explores the subject of creative inspiration.

The 45 poems in this series entry encourage artistic endeavors and celebrate aspects of creativity—uncertainty, play, fearlessness, noticing, and more. Organizing the volume into four sections, editor and bookshop founder Alma guides readers through the necessary “quiet, unfilled moments,” inviting them to surrender control. In “The Patience of Ordinary Things,” Pat Schneider offers painstaking observations of everyday objects (“soap dries quietly in the dish, / And towels drink the wet / From the skin of the back”). Alma writes that “to create is to engage the senses fully.” “Olives,” by A.E. Stallings, is vivid with sensory imagery: “They recall / The harvest and its toil, / The nets spread under silver trees that foil / The blue glass of the heavens.” Attentiveness to nature is another source of inspiration, as in in “Wild Garlic” by Seán Hewitt (“…all across the floor / the spiked white flowers / light the way”), and “Daed-traa,” in which Jen Hadfield writes “I go to the rockpool at the slack of the tide / to mind me what my poetry’s for.” The collection includes many notable British and Irish poets, including Christopher Meredith, Norman MacCaig, Orlagh O’Farrell, Louis MacNeice, and Simon Armitage, as well as distinguished writers from around the world, like Thich Nhat Hanh, Miroslav Holub, Joy Harjo, Rabindranath Tagore, and Nozawa Bonchō.

Inspiration-seekers will enjoy following in the footsteps of these poetic muses.