The Emergency Poet

A brilliant new anthology of poems designed to lift your mood and help you to overcome stress, depression and general anxiety. Arranged by spiritual ailment, the sections include a range of verse, new and old, which may be of comfort to those in need of a pick-me-up for the soul.

Originally published: New York: Grove Press, 1957.

A thoughtful and varied collection of feel-good poems for any day and any situation. This brand-new anthology is designed to tackle your everyday needs, whether work is getting you down, you need a moment to relax, you're having trouble sleeping or need a little romantic guidance, this book has a poem for you. This collection will lift your mood and brighten your day, offering poetic help wherever it is needed.

'Truly a marvellous collection ... There is balm for the soul, fire for the belly, a cooling compress for the fevered brow, solace for the wounded, an arm around the lonely shoulder - the whole collection is a matchless compound of hug, tonic and kiss' Stephen Fry As heard on BBC Radio 4, the essential prescriptions from William Sieghart's poetic dispensary Sometimes only a poem will do. These poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice offer comfort, delight and inspiration for all; a space for reflection, and a chance to realize - I'm not the only one who feels like this. In the years since he first had the idea of prescribing short, powerful poems for all manner of spiritual ailments, William Sieghart has taken his Poetry Pharmacy around the length and breadth of Britain, into the pages of the Guardian, onto BBC Radio 4 and onto the television, honing his prescriptions all the time. This pocket-sized book presents the most essential poems in his dispensary: those which, again and again, have really shown themselves to work. Whether you are suffering from loneliness, lack of courage, heartbreak, hopelessness, or even from an excess of ego, there is something here to ease your pain. 'The book is delightful; it rightly resituates poetryin relation to its biggest and most serious task: helping us to live and diewell' Alain de Botton

Poetry. "Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky's emergency brake but just remember it won't do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet's take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling the poems of EMERGENCY BRAKE become a young woman's survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril." David St. John"

The Lions bare of snow, crowded express buses, a giant red turning letter W. Vancouver: A Poem is George Stanley's vision of the city where he lives, though he does not call it his own. Vancouver, the city, becomes Stanley's palimpsest: an overwritten manuscript on which the words of others are still faintly visible. Here the Food Floor's canned exotica, here the stores of Chinatown, here the Cobalt Hotel brimful of cheap beer and indifferent women. The poet travels through the urban landscape on foot and by public transit, observing the multifarious life around him, noting the at times abrupt changes in the built environment, and vestiges of its brief history. As he records his perceptions, the city enters his consciousness in unforeseen ways, imposing its categories and language. Skirting chestnuts on the sidewalk or reading William Carlos Williams's "Paterson" on the Granville Bridge, the poet travels along the inlet, past the mountains, under the trees, interrogating the local world with his words.

The hospital poems of "Emergency Room Wrestling" read like a Bukowski of the ER: the voice of the author, who calls himself The Dirty Poet, reveals a disarming humor, bawdiness, and even exuberance in the urgency of illness, injury, and mortality.