Poetry Poison: Revenge

Deborah Alma

REVENGE, they say, is a dish best served cold… so if you need an outlet to satisfy a deep hurt, to act as a cradle for your grievance, to fuel a fantasy of righting a wrong, or just some clever, perfectly pitched words to stoke the fires of your righteous fury, you might find exactly what you need in this brilliant collection of Poetry Poison.

Revenge is just one of a beautifully created collection of pocket-sized hardback gift books containing carefully curated poetic poisons compiled by Deborah Alma (pictured below), a poet and editor who, with her partner, the poet James Sheard, co-founded the world’s first walk-in Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire in 2019. Offering poetry on prescription proved to be a big success, and the two poets have since expanded their ‘pharmacy’ to branches in London’s Oxford Street and York.

And these gloriously dark, wry and stylish new poetry books – which comprise the topics Revenge, Vices, Darkness and Humbug – come full of both classic and new poems and are ‘prescribed’ for when sweetness fails, ‘offering a controlled dose of the less virtuous emotions, to be taken slowly and without apology.’

In Poetry Poison: Revenge, readers can imbibe a potent and unapologetic dose of literary vengeance, featuring powerful verses of curses, ill-will, and retribution straight from the meditative minds of literary greats like Shakespeare, John Donne and Christina Rossetti.

Poetry Poison: Vices, meanwhile, delivers a distillation of the finest sins and vices for the indulgence of appetites, moments of temptation and relish, the celebration of excess, to encourage delight in the forbidden, and for the cultivation of delicious bad habits. 

With poems from names such as William Blake and Henry David Thoreau to enjoy, Vices is an intoxicating selection, exploring human flaws, lust, desire, gluttony, sloth and more.

And in Poetry Poison: Darkness, readers are prescribed extract of night, perfect for howling to the moon, the contemplation of shadows and love of the unlit, and lifting the veil between the real and the imagined.

Feel free to take a profound journey into the deep night where you will discover evocative verses of shadow, solitude, and the unknown from Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Thomas Hardy and many other poets.

And on October 15, Poetry Poison: Humbug, the perfect Christmas gift poetry collection, will hit the shelves. Prescribed as ideal for the detection of nonsense, for a healthy disregard of fashionable thinking, for the pricking of pomposity, to counteract sentimentality and for the exercise of wit and scepticism, there could be no better antidote to an excess of the festive spirit!
(Macmillan, hardback, £10 each)