Emergency Poet by Deborah Alma

Life has a habit of tripping us up at times, usually when we least expect (or can cope) with it. In The Emergency Poet, Deborah Alma (the Emergency Poet herself) presents a thoughtful and highly therapeutic selection of poems, designed to lift your mood, helping you relax and take stock.

We’ve all experienced moments when life feels overwhelming, and it can sometimes be difficult to see a path through troubled times. Organized into sections that follow a life through its challenges and hard times – from learning to be yourself, falling in and out of love and having children, through to ill-health, dying and coping with grief, as well as poems that serve as a tonic to lift the spirits – the anthology contains poems old and new, from world-renowned and lesser-known poets. What matters is that their words speak intimately, as though from one person to another, with grace and wisdom. They are soothing and carefully chosen to purge melancholy, provide hope and give courage in the most trying circumstances.

In this anthology of poems for every circumstance, Deborah Alma proves that poems really can be the perfect pick-me-ups for the soul.

We all have moments in which life can feel overwhelming. This book presents a selection of poems that is designed to lift your mood.

About the Author:

Deborah Alma is a UK poet, editor and teacher. She has worked using poetry with people in hospice care with dementia, as well as with vulnerable women’s groups and children in schools, and she has lectured 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 bookshop in Shropshire with her partner the poet James Sheard in 2019.

She is the editor of The Emergency Poet: An Anti-stress Poetry Anthology, The Everyday Poet, #Me Too: Rallying Against Sexual Harassment: A Women’s Poetry Anthology, Ten Poems of Happiness, and co-edited with Dr Katie Amiel These Are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS. She is the editor of National Trust: Nature Poems, Poetry Projects to Make and Do, Dirty Laundry, and the Poetry Prescription series. She is co-author of The Poetry Business School with Mark Constantine & Kate Downey-Evans.

25 Sep 2025
 

The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology by Deborah Alma ISBN 9781789297782