Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 58
ISBN: 9781781725597
Publication date: October 21, 2019
Price: £9.99
Out of stock
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 58
ISBN: 9781781725641
Publication date: October 21, 2019
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
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.
“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
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.
“The determination or need to write about even the bleakest of experiences is the defiant light being held up. Yoseloff does not rage; her style is quieter and involves a steady, undeceived gaze.”
Martyn Crucefix
“There’s beauty in this collection, trussed to hope and a hunger for life. Perfect for days when dusk insists on arriving early.”
Judy Darley, SkyLightRain
“The emotional experiences behind the poems are at their most conspicuously restrained in the ‘Redactions’ pieces, but a similar repression acts throughout the book. Prosaic, hard, built of short phrases, these poems have the textures of the city; but while those set in urban landscapes can be bleak … there is no solace to be found in the countryside … There is, perhaps, an unease with the wildness of the rural landscape: the unpredictability of its creatures, its vulnerability to natural forces.”
Anna Lewis, Wales Arts Review
‘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
‘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
‘The great strength of this collection is Yoseloff’s openness about her struggle, not with cancer, but with herself and how much to give to her art, how far to take readers into the dark places where she shines a light; that light protects her and she is continually reaching for it.’
Under the Radar
‘Yoseloff has listened to voices other than her own, has caught their words and made poems that help us remember.’
London Grip
