The Poetry Pharmacy by William Sieghart Hamish Robinson
The Poetry Pharmacy: Tried-and-true Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind and Soul By William Sieghart Particular Books £12.99 Oldie price £8.11 inc p&p
If poetry has the power to move – to lift or console or enthuse – why not put that power to use?
If poetry is aimed at readers, why not have some experienced poetry reader, one who has himself felt its therapeutic effects, direct the fire? Indeed, why not prescribe individual poems to alleviate particular conditions much as a doctor prescribes potions or pills? More: why not create an almanac of such prescriptions so that individual patients can look up their condition and self
medicate – a sort of poetical Monthly Index of Medical Specialities (or MIMS) for the laity?
Such is the eminently benevolent idea behind William Sieghart’s anthology The Poetry Pharmacy. And this idea has not just been thought up – there have been trials. Like genuine pharmaceuticals, the prescribed poems have been tested on a selected public – literary festival goers, Radio 4 listeners, Guardian readers, etc – and been found efficacious and presumably without serious side-effects. This, of course, only applies to responsible use: the real medical MIMS, it should be remembered, was once a much sought-after publication with certain sections of the public, and one supposes that it would be possible for a susceptible reader to overdose on a confidence-booster like Kipling’s ‘If’, and become rather tiresome.
As any Derrida-reading undergraduate could have told you thirty years ago, a pharmacy is a dangerous metaphor: drugs can be abused, can poison as well as cure. Worse still, where there is need, they can have little or no effect at all. They can be all promise and packaging. Sample: under the heading ‘Lack of Courage’ – i.e. a cure for – we are offered the following antiphonal poem by Christopher Logue: ‘Come to the edge./ We might fall./ Come to the edge./ It’s too high!/ COME TO THE EDGE!/ And they came,/ And he pushed,/ And they flew.’
This often timorous reader must report that he was left cold, though not so cold that he would not have been curious to see the poet try the experiment upon himself. At least this was my first reaction. On reflection, knowing something of Christopher Logue, and knowing him adept, like many poets, at biting the hand that feeds and capable of giving the reader some hearty backblows, I began to wonder if the poem was not satirical. The ‘They’ of the poem may have flown like the proverbial stone, in which case the poem was intended as an incitement to suspicion and scorn, not courage.
On further reflection, I began to wonder if the poem was not more ambivalent still. Perhaps the poet, like many of the bullied, had introjected the bully. Perhaps he was both bully and bullied, and was telling us that our courage would always fail, and that we too would need to be bullied, and that he, who, like a sergeant-major, had the requisite experience of a degraded humanity, was prepared to do the bullying.
Again, hardly an incitement to courage. With drugs, one unsatisfactory sample destroys the batch. But, even if not all the prescriptions work or turn out to involve complications, we are still left with an anthology. What of that? The poems tend to be short, and most of the space is given up to Sieghart’s page-long introductions – the equivalent of the doctor’s chat. These are, for the most part, engaging, sensible and cheerfully un-prescriptive.
If you wanted someone by your bedside in the distressful hour, Sieghart might well be your man. The most moving line in the book is the comic reassurance his father gave him just before he died: ‘When I’m gone,’ he said, ‘you’ll still hear my voice. It’s just that it won’t annoy you anymore.’
Only occasionally does he let slip an optimistic untruth: ‘We will always have a chance to be reborn into positivity and change. Grab it.’ The poems themselves tend to be upbeat – some remorselessly so. The old tub-thumper ‘Thinking’, attributed to a Walter D. Wintle, supposedly a recipe against defeatism – ‘If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost’ – might make one more rather than less defeatist.
Wintle had obviously never heard about Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and ‘polar bear syndrome’, of these Russian heavy-weights setting themselves the task of not thinking about a polar bear for thirty minutes and failing. Another doubtful prescription…