Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Bishop's Castle to get a poetry pharmacy


Earlier this month it was a wolf sanctuary: now comes news that Bishop's Castle is to get a poetry pharmacy.

As the Guardian reports:
The poet Deborah Alma is preparing to open the UK’s first poetry pharmacy. Here, instead of sleeping pills and multivitamins, customers will be offered prescriptions of Derek Walcott and Elizabeth Bishop. 
Alma, who as the “Emergency Poet” has prescribed poems as cures from the back of a 1970s ambulance for the last six years, is now setting up a permanent outlet in a shop at Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire. 
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".

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