📖 Publication Day Book Review ~ The Emergency Poet by Deborah Alma

Michael O’Mara
25 September 2025

My thanks to the publisher fir my copy of this book to review

A ten-year anniversary edition of Deborah Alma’s

much-loved collection, The Emergency Poet:

An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology

In The Emergency Poet, Deborah Alma (the Emergency Poet herself) has distilled all her warmth and wisdom into a seriesof ‘verse cures’. Here she presents a thoughtful and highly therapeutic selection of poems, both familiar and lesserknown, from the likes of Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, E. E Cummings, Seamus Heaney, Elaine Feinstein, DerekWalcott, and Fleur Adcock.

From ‘Days when the world is too much with us’ to ‘Tonics to the lift the spirits’, they are soothing and carefully chosen topurge melancholy, provide hope and give courage in the most trying circumstances. Sections follow a life through itschallenges – from learning to be yourself, falling in and out oflove and having children, through to ill-health, coping with grief and death.

📖My Review..

I love a poetry anthology and this ten year anniversary edition of The Emergency Poet ticks all the right boxes as there is really something for all occasions. At stressful times in my life I have turned to poetry in order to make sense of a world gone mad, it is especially comforting to relax and let the beauty of words drift around you. 

Beautifully presented, The Emergency Poet is a wonderfully tactile little book which is just the right size to fit comfortably into a pocket or a handbag, or which sits patiently on a bedside table. It is a comforting sort of book to have just within reach when an emergency pick-me-up is required. Described as an ‘Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology’ I have certainly found that to be an accurate description. 

Perfectly divided into ten quite separate sections,  I was particularly thrilled to discover one of my favourite poems The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry opens the ‘For days when the world is too much with us’ section, and if you are not familiar with this lovely poem, I do recommend you search it out or even better treat yourself to this lovely anthology and discover more hidden gems and valued treasures.

I have found much to enjoy in this anthology recognising some old friends amongst the choices whilst discovering poems, and poets, I haven’t come across before. It would make a perfect gift for anyone who loves poetry, or for someone who is going through a challenging time or even as a little gift to oneself in order to help on those darker days when an emergency poem is just what is needed to keep the dark clouds at bay.

About the Author

Deborah Alma is the Emergency Poet and a bookseller. Since publication of her first book, The Emergency Poet ten years ago, her profile has grown enormously. She has worked using poetry with people with dementia, in hospice care, with women’s groups and with children in schools and taught at both Worcester and Keele universities. From 2012 she was the Emergency Poet, offering poetry on prescription from her vintage ambulance. She co-founded the world’s first walk-in Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire in 2019, which now has a second branch inside Lush Spa on Oxford Street in

London.

She is the editor of several anthologies, notably These Are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS, the National Trust’s Nature Poems, and the new Poetry Pharmacy series with Macmillan. Her first full collection of poems, Dirty Laundry, is published by Nine Arches Press.

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