When I first picked up this beautiful, handbound, limited edition of Pallavi Padma-Uday’s new collection of poems, Lola in Belfast, at the Belfast Book Festival in June 2024, I was perplexed by the title. Lola, the female name, has certain associations of a twelve year old girl, lost and misled. But when you open the book, the introduction explains that “lola” means sorrow. The reader is struck by the ingenuity of the poet in giving the collection this title, as it connects her authentic roots with the new world she inhabits. It is, like Padma-Uday’s first collection, Orisons in the Dark, clearly a woman’s story, and a feminist one, too.

William Sieghart, British entrepreneur, publisher and philanthropist and the founder of the Forward Prizes for Poetry, firmly believes that poetry can heal. The publisher of The Poetry Pharmacy is not the first person to state that “poetry can save lives”. In the same way that reading a poem can give us solace in times of grief, or give us hope when we feel lost, Lola, in this collection, expresses herself in moments of anguish and loneliness in verse. And yes, poetry does its miracles and indeed, it could be prescribed as her medicine.

This is a beautiful collection written by...