<![CDATA[Alex Josephy Poet

<![CDATA[Alex Josephy Poet - The Latest]]>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:20:37 +0000Weebly<![CDATA[Ekphrasis in Eastbourne!]]>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 10:08:42 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/ekphrasis-in-eastbourneEkphrasis – poetry derived from or inspired by a work of visual art – has a long history, including perhaps most famously poems by Keats (Ode to a Grecian Urn), and W. H. Auden (Musée des Beaux Arts).
Poets do often find affinities with painters and paintings.
Earlier this year I took part in a collaborative project between Eastbourne Poetry Café and the Towner Art Gallery, in which a group of local poets responded to the Towner's 'Sussex Modernism' exhibition.
My thanks to all who took part, and especially to the Eastbourne Poetry Café for including me. At first I thought it would be impossible to write in response to a retrospective art exhibition, but slowly the poems started to arrive...

Here's a link to some of what I wrote.

And here is one of the poems and its starting point, an uneasily beautiful watercolour by David Jones.
I loved Jones’s delicate, thoughtful paintings of the view from his studio in Portslade, made around 1927. Suffering from shell shock after World War I, Jones produced paintings that seem to be haunted by memories of the trauma he had recently experienced, across the sea that lay just beyond his balcony. The quote is from Jones’ epic war poem, set in the classical era but relevant to his own times too.

A Dissident Retreat

Oh blessed head, hold the striplings from the narrow sea
David Jones, from ‘In Parenthesis’

A studio facing the waves
should be a little bowl of peace

brightened by a salt breeze,
calmed by sea lullabies.

But the tide is always high
in this beachside house;

it swallows the balcony, spills
into the unfinished painting.

Water colours shiver the sky,
accumulate in clouds

that spread dark rumours
across the dissolving line

between this look-out
and what he’s not forgotten.

He sweetens the room
with a holiday deckchair,

flowers in shell colours.
But as he starts to paint, the chair

holds out a stretcher, the asters
stand watchful in their vase.

]]><![CDATA[A Bit Chuffed]]>Tue, 04 Nov 2025 16:25:03 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/a-bit-chuffed

This is a first for me. New pamphlet, co-written and produced with local poet friend Anwesha Arya, now on sale in our local Waterstones. Nuff said!

]]><![CDATA[A New Collection is a Lovesome Thing]]>Tue, 04 Feb 2025 15:59:07 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/a-new-collection-is-a-lovesome-thing

Creating a poetry collection is such an interesting activity.

Like a poem, a collection needs to resonate back and forth within itself, so you experiment with groups of poems, chains of images, words that chime with other words. You try to listen to the tones of your own poems: their music, their temperature, where their hearts lie. You put certain poems together, thinking they'll get on well, but they spring apart, turn their backs on each other, make new friends. Some of them change direction or grow new lines. Many shrink, some to the point of disappearing. You walk away in search of a glass of water, or painkillers, or just to attend to another task. Yes, the washing up still needs to be done. You return to the collection, only to discover that it's no longer the same as it was when you left it. It implores you to think again. It announces it's changed its name. It's unwilling to go in the direction you have in mind; it has directions of its own. Above all, it insists on saying more than you thought you wanted it to say.

At least, that's how it's been for me when I try to herd my poems into a collection.

So this is by way of celebrating that I do have a new collection ready, about to go into the editorial process with Pindrop Press. I love it, in all its unruliness, and I hope readers will love it too. (Stands up from desk and does a creaky but happy little dance).

]]><![CDATA[Again Behold the Stars in Rye!]]>Mon, 30 Sep 2024 17:44:30 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/agaihn-behold-the-stars-in-ryeOur four woman Rye Arts Festival reading was a great experience, despite the awful weather which meant we performed in St Mary's church instead of the castle. The readers were amazing, the church a wonderfully evocative setting. Martin and Kt Bruce of Rye News and Harbour Videography made a small video recording that gives a good flavour, and Matt Wells took these photos. The poems got the airing they had been wanting, having been launched in lockdown!

]]><![CDATA[Bringing It Home To Rye]]>Mon, 26 Aug 2024 10:34:51 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/bringing-it-home-to-ryeLooking forward to 26th September, when I'll be performing 'Again Behold the Stars' in the herb garden inside the walls of the Ypres Castle here in Rye, as part of the fabulous Rye Arts Festival 2024. Glimpses of Italy brought to my new home iin south-east England! I feel very lucky to have three other Siege Girls getting ready to share the readings with me - Janet Stott, Judith Shaw and Isabel Ryan. The beautiful castle setting should add a whole other dimension, as Rye meets Montalcino meets the frustrations and solaces of lockdown.

]]><![CDATA[At last... a new writing perch]]>Tue, 04 Jun 2024 20:49:35 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/at-last-a-new-writing-perch

After two years in limbo, reasons to be cheerful... we're living in our renovated house...I have a desk with a view... books coming out of their boxes. New notebook. New pencils. Oh, especially the new pencils.

]]><![CDATA[Bird-hiding in Rye]]>Tue, 31 Oct 2023 16:27:41 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/bird-hiding-in-rye

A new home in Rye has sent me on long walks along the shore and long waits in wooden hides, starting to learn the names and ways of the many different birds who live here or pass through. Like me, many of them move from one home to another, flap-flap-glide through my thoughts, find perches in my poems.

Waterbird

I’ll remember you as a tufted duck
shaking out your feathers fresh from a dive.
You turn to show your snowy flank,
punkish crest and gold eye,
give me a a sideways look.

Another time I find you in a flotilla
of shovelers, scooping the dark shallows
of a flooded quarry. I won’t forget
your hunchy neck, your green face, how
you charm me with flatworms.

Some days you’re plover neat, rounded
and ringed, and wedded to the shore.
Sometimes you’re egret elegant until,
with a chuckle, you flash your sunshine feet.

Published in the Sussex Wildlife Trust anthology, 'Water'
sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk/discover/go-wild-at-home/creative-nature-writing/water-anthology-2023

]]><![CDATA[Haymaking]]>Fri, 21 Apr 2023 10:23:22 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/haymakingThis will be good fun: a day in beautiful Hay-on-Wye, making poems with local poets while (I hope) the sun shines!

]]><![CDATA[Back in Italy... in Delight and Trouble!]]>Sat, 16 Jul 2022 13:41:37 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/back-in-italy-in-delight-and-troubleMy best latest news is that my poem sequence Again Behold the Stars has won a Cinnamon Pamphlet Award, and will be published in spring 2023.
Thank you, mille grazie, Cinnamon Press!

These are poems very dear to my heart and I can't wait to see them in print. They are set in Montalcino, the town where I live when in Italy. The central narrative thread happens in the 1500s, a time of siege. But the poems are also about events in the world right now, and drawn from my own experience of lockdown over the past few years.

A small taster from near the opening, honouring the role of women in medieval sieges:

Redoubt

Three women’s battalions, uniformed in red and violet taffeta, fought on the city walls.

La Fortezza bares a stony
countenance. She gathers
the beseiged under her skirts.

Against her stubborn wall
the cannonballs shatter
like fishermen’s glass floats,

leave no more than scratches.
Moss heals her. Sparrows roost
inside her scars. She glowers

from her high redoubt
beyond the mangled plain,
all the way to the sea

where boats cast off as easily
as taffeta slips from the loom.

In other news, I've broken my hand, luckily not the writing one.
The hospital at Nottola, where they straighened the bones and encased my arm in plaster, was exactly as it was when I wrote this (about partner David's broken ankle) in 2015! You can find this and others from that time in my first collection, White Roads, Paekakariki Press 2018.

La Sala Gessi

Lined up, not crying
in the corridor: girl,
both hands twisted
under a scarf;

grape-pickers, bare feet
tenderly tilted
like knackered horses
shifting the weight;

ashen-faced woman
on a stretcher; you,
your swollen leg,
me with a crumbling panino.

Tutte rotte!
pronounces the nurse
with pride, waving a sheaf
of X-ray notes. All broken.

Inside the sala
they keep their mystery,
their buckets of white slop,
swaddle your pain

in gesso. Woozy,
we join the procession,
happy to stumble
through swing doors

lurching on stampelle,
in wheeled carriages
or wreathed in slings;
part-human, part-cocoon.

]]><![CDATA[Some particuarly good things do still arrive through the letterbox!]]>Fri, 19 Nov 2021 16:32:55 GMThttps://www.alexjosephy.net/the-latest/some-particuarly-good-things-do-still-arrive-through-the-letterboxDavid Underdown's wonderful Calder Valley Poetry pamphlet, 'Snig', landed on my doormat on a grey November day and I've been enjoying the poems ever since. Here's one I love - appropriate for me at the moment as I'm in the process of moving house.

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