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.
[From the publisher’s website]
Formerly
by Tamar Yoseloff & Vici MacDonald
ISBN: 978-0-9572738-0-1
Published by Hercules Editions, October 2015
Second edition
Featuring poems by Tamar Yoseloff and photographs by Vici MacDonald, Formerly commemorates the forgotten corners of a London fast disappearing. The book is a sequence of 14 informal sonnets, each written in response to an accompanying image. It is now in its second edition, printed in full colour, with every copy signed by the authors. Each book comes with a free 10-page location guide, Off The Map. Formerly was the subject of an exhibition at the Saison Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London, in 2013, and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award.
Tamar’s individual collections, selections from which appear in A Formula for Night:
