Belief Systems

ISBN: 978-1-913437-92-3
Published by Nine Arches Press, June 2024

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

The poems in Tamar Yoseloff's Belief Systems act as a call to make something worthwhile from the wreckage of our world, in the spirit of the radical artists she evokes, such as John Latham, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg – visionaries who located power and beauty in what is forgotten.

Yoseloff’s poems intimately capture the artists at thought and at work – composing, repurposing and finding new life in the borders and liminal spaces. Alive with decay and regrowth, this collection leads us through a movement of seasons, along wild pathways and through stormy weather, finding places of transformation where nature, music and art thrive at the margins. Ultimately, Belief Systems point us towards the vital human acts of Illumination and imagination in this hyper-accelerated age – where “the small blue flame / like a pilot flame” casts light on the mysteries of creation and existence.

Praise for Belief Systems:

“With the quiet authority and craft of a mature poet, Yoseloff takes on the human condition in the light of our present moment with a spare and unsparing precision. Revisiting and remaking familiar structures like the sonnet, the specular, the elegy, these poems in their hope and their despair serve to remind us of the enduring and universal power of art to move and change us. Enter this book prepared to be ambushed by devastating and intimate ‘collaborations’ with artists, composers and poets. Do not expect to emerge unscathed.” Jacqueline Saphra

“Modern art comes alive in these poems that exist, as Robert Rauschenberg wanted his works to, in the space between art and life. Rauschenberg’s Combines with their intensely suggestive yet never easily explicable conjunctions of unlikely, emotive stuff are arguably the most poetic masterpieces of recent art. Yoseloff explores them in language, probing their mysteries and amplifying their strangeness. She rises just as freshly to artists as varied as Joan Eardley and Joseph Beuys, yet these are also poems that snuffle the here and now, never letting art replace life.”
Jonathan Jones

“Tamar Yoseloff’s Belief Systems is a tough-minded, unsparing collection, its wintry landscapes drained of colour, places where only yew-trees and implacable ivy thrive. This is the world of afterwards. Yoseloff’s beloved London is offered an austere elegy, while inward terrors take up the slack – a fear of hands, Nosferatu hauling himself upstairs. At the same time, Yoseloff’s lifelong immersion in visual art pays off – in a poem where Joan Eardley paints as ‘the sun is making gold of plain old hay’ and in the series paired with Robert Rauschenberg’s enigmatic Combines, where wonderment and gallows humour combine. Highly recommended, need I say?” Sean O’Brien

Cover artwork: Robert Rauschenberg, Summerstorm, 1959. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

The Black Place

ISBN: 978-1-78172-559-7
Published by Seren Books, November 2019

“Yoseloff has listened to voices other than her own, has caught their words and made poems that help us remember.” London Grip

The Black Place is a dark and gorgeously multi-faceted artwork, like a black diamond. Tamar Yoseloff eschews the sentimental, embraces alternatives, offers antidotes to cheery capitalist hype. But there is a sort of dark grandeur to her view of mortality, one that matches the sublime desert painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, the subject of the title poem. The central sequence in this collection, ‘Cuts’, is a characteristically tough look at the poet's cancer diagnosis and treatment. The diagnosis arrives at the same time as the Grenfell Tower fire disaster, a public trauma overshadowing a private one. These poems focus on the strangeness of the illness, and of our times - they refuse to offer panaceas or consolations. 

Tamar Yoseloff's delicate and precise poems demonstrate a fearlessness in the cool way they approach difficult subjects. The Black Place, at once passionate, truthful and detached, applies that determined eye to the progress of a serious illness, and a wider sense of loss and decay. Yoseloff makes us look at the world and then look at it again to see something new.” Tim Dooley

“While The Black Place is rain-drenched and concrete-bunkered, a filmic urban vision stripped down to its inner grit, no one lyricises mean streets with such compassion as Tamar Yoseloff.” Claire Crowther

A Formula for Night:
New and Selected Poems

ISBN: 978-1-78172-268-8
Published by Seren Books, October 2015

Tamar Yoseloff is a poet whose career has been profoundly influenced by the visual arts. A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems is the eagerly awaited summation of her work, encompassing selections from four published print volumes: Sweetheart, Barnard’s Star, Fetch and The City with Horns (now mostly out of print); and poems from her collaborations with artists: Formerly, Marks and Desire Paths. The book also includes a generous selection of beautiful new poems. The title poem is based upon an installation by Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans. An image from his work, a light sculpture, is used for the cover of the book.

The new poems are often artful explorations of paradox: death/birth, dark/light, clarity/mystery. In the ‘Swimmer of Lethe’  the protagonist says: ‘I’ve mastered surface/ here everything is under.’ Atmospheres are conjured, surfaces interrogated and humans are often found woefully or wonderfully implicated in their settings in unexpected ways. A misunderstood creature, the ‘Muntjac’, is seen with tender clarity ‘Now white with May/tar and fern on his delicate hooves…’. The poet’s vocabulary is spikey, sometimes ferociously so. Sex is another paradox, its violence at times palpable: from ‘Pictures of Spring’:  ‘I bend and break, bend/ and break, contort my limbs/ into these lovelocked shapes.’  ‘Hospital Time’: ‘collapses, folds the days into sterile gauze,/a thousand different words for hurt’ beautifully evokes the estranging, atmosphere of a hospital but slowly evolves to become a moving elegy to the poet’s mother.

Tamar’s individual collections, selections from which appear in A Formula for Night: