Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 170
ISBN: 9781781722688
Publication date: October 12, 2015
Price: £12.99
Out of stock
‘A Formula for Night is a significant journey for both the poet and the reader. Take it.’ – DURA
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 poet’s first collection, Sweetheart, was a PBS Special Commendation and the winner of the Jerwood/Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. She was the recipient of an Arts Council New Writing award which helped her complete her second manuscript, later published as Barnard’s Star. Of her collaborations, Marks was published as a limited-edition artist’s book and pamphlet by Pratt Contemporary Art in 2007. Desire Paths was a limited-edition portfolio produced by Galerie Hein Elferink in the Netherlands. Both books feature work by artist Linda Karshan.
More recently, Formerly, a chapbook of poems based on forgotten London locations, with accompanying photographs by Vici MacDonald, was the debut publication of their co-founded imprint, Hercules Editions. Formerly was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2012. Exhibitions of the poems and photographs have appeared in two venues in London: the Poetry Society’s Poetry Café and the Saison Poetry Library at the Southbank.
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 Yoseloff
Tamar Yoseloff was born in the US and moved to London in 1987. She ran the Terrible Beauty reading series at the Troubadour Coffee House, before joining the Poetry School as Programme Coordinator. She is currently a core tutor at the Poetry School.
Her debut book, Sweetheart, won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was a PBS Commendation. Her collection A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems (Seren) was published in 2015. She is also the author of Formerly (the inaugural chapbook from her publishing venture, Hercules Editions), incorporating photographs by Vici MacDonald and shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award; two collaborative editions with the artist Linda Karshan (Marks, published by Pratt Original Editions in 2007 and Desire Paths, published in an edition of 10 by Galerie Hein Elferink in 2012) and Nowheres, a privately-produced book with the artist Charlotte Harker in 2015. Both Formerly and Nowheres were featured in exhibitions at the Poetry Café, and Formerly was also the basis for an exhibition at the National Poetry Library.
She has edited A Room to Live In: A Kettle’s Yard Anthology (Salt, 2007) and Lookout: Poetry from Aldeburgh Beach (Lookout Editions, 2017). She was also the Reviews Editions for Poetry London and Poetry Editor of Art World magazine.
She runs writing courses for galleries including the Hayward, the RA, the National Gallery, the Fitzwilliam, Kettle’s Yard, Somerset House and Tate Liverpool. She has taught for a number of London-based writing organisations including Spread the Word and Birkbeck.
She received an MPhil from the University of Glamorgan in 2003 and a PhD from Aberystwyth University in 2010. She is currently a visiting guest lecturer on the Newcastle/Poetry School MA course in Writing Poetry and the Chair of the Poetry and Spoken Word Group of the Society of Authors.
