Tamar Yoseloff

Here is a small selection of Tamar’s poems from her most recent collections.

Please click on the covers to find out more about each book.

The Black Place

(after Georgia O’Keefe)

How simply she shows us:
a sweep of the brush, her thin wrist
distilling the spring desert
into basic green and blue.

Is there a black line dividing
sky and ridge, or is it just a trick
of contrast? I see it in this real sky,
this real ridge, the picture I make

with my eyes, the here and now
of sight. She called it ‘The Black Place’,
perhaps that’s why I want to find
that line, to clarify her phrase;

she was in the desert, high noon,
not a trace of cloud. She pulls my eye
to a darker passage, a depression,
maybe a cave, shadowed in broad light.

When I look up to the sky
in this real place, where the sun
fires my skin, I see a hill behind a hill,
and then another and another:

the place beyond our vision, the place
inside the cave, where the sun
can never reach. It chills me
just to think it into being.

We’ll never find it; as soon as we arrive,
the distance shifts to somewhere else,
we remain in foreground, everything moving
around us, even when we’re still.

She found the bellow in a skull,
the swagger in a flower; in turn
her lover made her wrist, her breast
his subject. They lived,

exposed their lives to light, and now
they’re gone. The black place she made
remains. She shows me how to find it
here, beyond the ridge.

From The Black Place
Published by Seren Books, 2019

The Formula for Night

It’s getting late. Light
floods the public bar,
you’re the final one to leave.
The mirror’s silver eye
gives you back yourself, precise.
You’ve lived your life through
glass, you miss the brush

of skin, someone whispering
your name. You hear it now,
a calling on the wind, insistent,
a small but steady flame.
You carry in your bones a gasp
of summer heat, the formula
for night. You arrive at the end-

of-pier reveal – the heart-stop hour,
when this world briefly yields
to the next: a door that creaks
an inch or two to catch
a blinding beam. You want
to understand what can’t
be seen, the fact behind

the trick, the wires hidden
from your view, the blue breath
that powers the machine.
Raise your eyes to read the stars –
streetlight’s glare has cast them
dark; once-bright bulbs,
trembling elements crack

and fizzle as they die. Their light
is obsolete. But close
your eyes, and still you find
gold impressed beneath
your lids, a moment lived.
And when you open them again,
darkness is what’s left.

From A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems
Published by Seren Books, 2015

A Letter to WS Graham

Sydney – if I may call you Sydney – because I feel
you have been speaking to me all this time,
in the complex, common tongue you attempted
to decipher. And I’ve been listening, here
by the sea you said was listening. It is a space,
the sea, like all the other spaces you tried to
(de)construct, it is a poem that finds its turn
along the shoreline; a lament, a plain-
tive voice, like the mother of a drowned child.
The light is variable, and I write to hold it against
the shadows. It’s all we can ever do – try to hold
a moment disappearing even as we whisper its name
and place it in the light. Break here, stop
your difficult glances and cantankerous rambles.
Tell me
              how to say something about the sea
that hasn’t been said in thousands of words,
stumbling across the page like drunks, none of them
up to the job. The job is love, you said,
that’s why we stretch ourselves into a thousand
suffering shapes, like Hilton’s nudes or Lanyon’s thermals.
You made words of their colours, made words
for the sea that fancies itself a metaphor, too pretty
and brutal for simple truth.
                                                 Tell me
now that your words are done, how to keep going on.
The coast stretches too far for me to see,
but you’re ahead, in a lonely place (we make our own,
you said); from there you must be able to see us all,
lighting lamps with our voices.

From A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems
Published by Seren Books, 2015

Flat Iron Square

From Formerly, poems by Tamar Yoseloff, photos by Vici MacDonald
Published by Hercules Editions, 2012
Visit the book’s website

Ruin

From Nowheres, with drawings by Charlotte Harker and poems by Tamar Yoseloff
Published privately, 2017