The Poetry Pharmacy Returns by William Sieghart is a collection of poetry that Sieghart advises can help with our emotional states and the lessons that can be learned from poetry.
I loved the descriptions before each poem selected and the way in which it includes the emotions that may be felt if looking for a particular poem to help with that feeling.
Strength and Healing was my favourite part of the collection however the whole book flowed well in pace and poetry chosen.
A book I would recommend to anyone.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This follow-up to Poetry Pharmacy has a kinder touch overall. Something I would like to have on my shelf.

The theme carries itself more consistently this time around, compared to the previous book. A more humbling experience. Too many favourite poems to list!

Still skipping the “prescriptions”.

4 stars!

A beautiful book. No matter what you’re feeling, this book will contain a poem to lift your spirits or help you feel less alone. From grief, to heartbreak to familial issues, this book covers it all and on each page is a new piece of poetry to discover.

A poetry collection which holds the prescription for any ailment! As someone fairly new to poetry, and who struggles to get to grips with it sometimes, this was a brilliant introduction to the genre. I loved the explanations of how to read poetry, and the psychological element to the opening of each poem - poems are broken down by condition, so for example, there’s a poem for Letting Go or Grief and a brief explanation of the condition before the poem.
There is wonderful lack of pretension to this collection, and I can’t recommend it enough for anyone dipping their toe in the water! This is one to keep and flick through whenever times get difficult.

I'd already read the first 'The Poetry Pharmacy' book so I knew what to expect here and this is more of the same. I say that in a totally positive way, though - there's plenty of new things to discover here!

For those who haven't come across these books before, William Sieghart believes that poetry can genuinely support good mental health, either from giving you a different perspective on your problem or by giving you the comfort that whatever you face is something that other people have felt too. To this end, he has been a regular prescriber of poetry to people who come to him with problems. These books pick a problem, explain it, give an introduction to a relevant poem and then print the poem. A simple idea, but both interesting and quite effective, I found.

This covers a full range of different problems and poems to the first book in the series, although I had the sense that the introduction is the same or extremely similar. The poems are a selection of poetry from across time and cultures - from Rumi to Larkin, Neruda to Akhmatova, Atwood to Khalvati and many others I had never heard of before. There is also a little gem from Raymond Carver that perfectly encapsulates my feelings of lethargy in the current lockdown!

If you are open to the idea that poetry can help soothe the mind, then I would recommend this book wholeheartedly. I'm one of life's cynics but I still found lots to enjoy and some real food for thought.

As with the original 'Poetry Pharmacy', this book is an intelligently and sympathetically designed work that provides poetry with a secular social role. Rather than hastily riding the wave of its predecessor, 'The Poetry Pharmacy Returns' offers a fresh array of pertinent prescriptions. Sieghart conveys the community that has grown around his poetry prescriptions and the subsequent anthologies in a lovely way, inviting the reader to join this gentle network. As with the first text, I found the 'Index of Conditions' an easier tool with which to navigate the text than the contents page. The 'also suitable for' suggestions that appear under every condition sub-title is also helpful and, I find, helps to frame a poem as multi-faceted before I begin to read.