Well versed: the pharmacy that dispenses poems instead of medicine

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.

With its expansive library of brightly coloured books, the Poetry Pharmacy is every poetry fan’s dream. Alma knows that lyrical writing alone won’t cure anyone of life’s greatest traumas. Instead, the London branch – situated above Lush’s heavily scented flagship store – serves as a pastiche of the idea that words cure all. The centrepiece is a rich mahogany cabinet containing small glass bottles labelled with various emotions: ‘love’, ‘invigoration’, a rainbow-coloured ‘pride’. Some are more tongue-in-cheek. There are pills for ‘dithering’ and ‘existential angst’, while a glass flask sat atop reads: ‘Serenity: Keep out of reach of children.’

It’s aesthetically pleasing quirks like these that have made London’s Poetry Pharmacy store a huge hit on social media. In the two months since opening, the place has been near-constantly buzzing, with customers dropping in to buy gifts, sitting with a coffee from the ‘dispensary’ to read and ruminate, and many documenting the whole thing for social media.

Alma, the brainchild behind the operation, couldn’t be happier about it. She speaks to me over Zoom from a room backstage at the much larger original store in Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire, from where she still orders all the stock for both outlets. The last few months have been pretty “overwhelming”, she admits.