Alex Josephy Poet
  • Home
  • Poems
  • Readings
  • Publications and Awards
  • Contact
  • The Latest

Back in Italy... in Delight and Trouble!

16/7/2022

0 Comments

 
My 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.









0 Comments

    Author

    I like what Franz Kafka said:
    ​'Paths are made by walking'

    Archives

    July 2022
    November 2021
    September 2021
    March 2021
    November 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    February 2020
    October 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed



Alex Josephy