Kirjahaku

Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems from Seren includes dazzling new work as well as selections from her print collections and pieces from collaborations with artists. The title poem was commissioned by the Hayward Gallery for their 2013 exhibition Light Show and is based on an installation by the Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans – a meditation on the space between heaven and earth. The poems in this collection are also concerned with heavenly presences, as well as evil spirits, explorations of light and dark. As well as the title piece, many other poems are informed by the work of visual artists, such as David Harker, Alison Gill, Susan Collis and Fred Sandback. The book also includes some poems from Formerly, a chapbook published in 2012 which included photographs by Vici MacDonald. The Formerly project was shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

The Black Place is dark and gorgeously multi-faceted artwork, like a black diamond. Tamar Yoseloff is a gifted contrarian: she eschews the sentimental, embraces alternatives, is always offering us 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 of the same name by Georgia O’Keeffe which inspires the title poem. The central sequence in this collection is ‘Cuts’ which is a characteristically tough look at the poet’s cancer diagnosis and treatment: “The consultant says ‘carcinoma’ – the word a missile…”. 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, they refuse to offer panaceas or consolations. There are also some formally inventive ‘redacted’ poems that are blacked-out except for key words that float ominously within their depths.

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.