Again Behold the Stars

Alex Josephy lives in London and Italy and worked as an NHS education adviser. She has been a student and teacher of poetry all her life and has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London. For many years she has been a member of Robert Vas Dias’ Poetry School seminar and has she led a poetry reading group in East London. Her poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies including The Rialto, Smiths Knoll, The Interpreter’s House, Domestic Cherry and the online arts magazines London Grip, The Clearing and The Sigh Press in Italy. Alex’s other publications include the collections White Roads, Paekakariki Press, 2018 and Naked Since Faversham, Pindrop Press, 2020. Find out more about Alex’s writing on her website.

It is in their timelessness that Josephy’s glimpses—scorci—through the arrow slits of lives under siege are given their timeliness. The narrative of these exquisitely crafted poems, with their echoes of sonnets and madrigals, is both meditative and outraged; poems that exist of themselves and yet cohere. At its heart, however, Again Behold the Stars is an anthem of hope and endurance, is a celebration of the complexity and strength of community and womanhood in hard times. —Claire Dyer