Can you be re-lit by poetry? This little book offers everyone one of the oldest of all remedies for stress: the reading of poetry. Intended to help you endure some of your stressful moments and painful experiences, these poems tell us we are not alone. Again and again over the centuries great poets return to love and death and memory - remembrance of childhood joy, of happy days and beautiful places, of loved ones we have lost or feeling at peace and at one with the natural world. 'Stressed Unstressed' harvests an array of poems on such themes in the hope that they will speak to you when you are processing your worries or when you simply want to fill your mind with different, more positive thoughts. Words can act as drugs, and on the bedside or in a waiting-room this little volume of poetry can help in all sorts of difficult circumstances. So here is a selection of new poems and old, enduring classics and forgotten gems. Next time you are feeling stressed or anxious, worried or sleepless, panicky or unable to cope, 'Stressed Unstressed' invites you to join the thousands of others who have read and remembered and loved these poems - to form a very special community. This is bibliotherapy.

Gold title - A creative GP prescribed to Paula not a drug but a book that provided exercises for managing stress. This inspired the thought: if words can do the work of drugs, what is to lose by putting them in the toolkit of clinicians beside other, more formal remedies? - As "Poems on the Underground" (combined TCM 90k) have for many years been little mental oases for stressed-out London commuters, so a little volume of poetry in the waiting-room or by the home or hospital bed can help people in all sorts of difficult circumstances. - Another comp is "Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times" (TCM 126k) - also another therapeutic compilation - which reached a wider readership than any other anthology of contemporary poetry. - This project is to be launched in the shard, with Jonathan and Paula, alongside various luminaries including Stephen Fry. - Libraries in England have reported that loans of mental health self-help books have increased by 97% under the Reading Well Books on Prescription scheme. This scheme offers "book-based therapy and helpful reading", and has now reached around 445,000 people.