This review was first published in Poetry London 96. Find out more on their website www.poetrylondon.co.uk. 

Since finishing Tamar Yoseloff’s latest collection, I’ve found myself returning repeatedly to the Google image search to sift through pictures of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. It was of course, or so I told myself, because Yoseloff’s collection pointed me there explicitly, citing O’Keeffe repeatedly in notes and epigraphs and even drawing its cover image and title, The Black Place, from one of O’Keeffe’s preferred painting sites in the New Mexico desert. What’s more, I didn’t know her work as well as I should and, being uncertain as to how to start reviewing Yoseloff’s poetry, I could at least call it homework.

But there was something else drawing me back to O’Keeffe and the ideas she expressed in her paintings. Something to do with the way O’Keeffe could – effortlessly, it seemed – take a small thing like a flower and blow it up until it was like looking at something altogether new (and potentially risqué), or shrink and distil the expansiveness of a riverbed cutting through a mountain landscape to a gesture, a brushstroke. And then it struck me: Tamar Yoseloff, too, is a master manipulator of scale.

In painterly fashion, Yoseloff’s poems zoom in and out, expanding and contracting their objects; cities shrink to the size of toys (‘City’); hair is shown in such tight closeup one can ‘hear it break through skin’ (‘Night Mode’). Yet this play with scale is no mere aesthetic enterprise; Yoseloff’s underlying themes demand it. The sudden confrontation of one’s own mortality has a way of throwing things out of proportion, and cancer, one of the collection’s most prevalent subjects, is at heart a disease of scale, of disproportion. Yoseloff recognises that confronting something as simultaneously enormous and minuscule as cancer requires rebalancing, a dramatic rescaling to bring it anywhere close to comprehension, to expression in language: ‘I should know how to speak / of what’s inside me’, she confesses in ‘The C Word’, the opening poem, acknowledging both the task and its impossibility.

There is a moral side to manipulating proportion: Yoseloff seems acutely aware that by expanding personal pain to the scale of poetry, one risks causing the suffering of others to recede, and she counters it with acute selfawareness and self-deprecating humour. Several poems end with a thudding reversal of scale. In ‘Train at Night in the Desert’, for example, we find ourselves, in the final stanza, suddenly in the great expanse where a coyote is a reminder of human insignificance. After all, ‘it doesn’t give a shit about your plans’.

In fact, it is less the painterly manipulation of proportion that makes these poems so successful than it is the movement between scales, a movement that is essentially musical. The effectiveness of that final line is achieved through deft control across those that precede it. We move imperceptibly from the image of the man opposite on the train, ‘upholstered in thick fibres of slumber’, to a black dot of a city in miniature, ‘a bug stuck on its back, giggly legs flailing’, before the coyote’s insouciance cuts everything back to size.

Not all comparisons cohere as seamlessly as they might. Describing how dawn, in a poem of that name, ‘holds on to night’, and comparing it to ‘a blanket covering a body’, seems to me a little imperfectly aligned – but these instances are few and the movement between images is so seamless we don’t often linger.

And nowhere is this movement and its ethical consequences more apparent, or more deftly handled, than in the collection’s climactic, penultimate poem, ‘Cuts’. In its thirteen, sonnet-length sections, the poem shifts between personal and public traumas, singular and plural, closeup and far away, as Yoseloff weaves together the speaker’s own cancer diagnosis and the Grenfell Tower disaster, which occurred almost simultaneously. Such a poem could so easily confuse the distinctions between the two, elevating the personal to the tragic, even mythic, and thereby diminishing the enormity of the tragedy, but Yoseloff instead accentuates these scalar differences with striking, concrete observations, self-deprecating irony, and careful, occasionally sudden, movement between the two.

Poets reflect the mood of their times most effectively when they catch the undercurrents and uncertainties, finding connections which link them to a wider world. In The Black Place, her sixth collection, Yoseloff explores the bleakness of change and loss, joining them to the visual artists who speak most profoundly to her perception of Britain as it approaches 2020. Alongside public and private trauma is a recognition of how the post-Referendum mood affects our times.

Underneath the parallel contemporary events from her own life (a cancer diagnosis and the Grenfell Tower disaster of June 2017) are references to paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe whose ‘Black Place IV’ provides both the title poem and the cover image. The landscape, elemental and with no human life, has shadows and doesn’t yield its secrets easily; that is its appeal. Yoseloff draws out the connection between the painted place and her ‘real’ place — discomforting in its honesty:

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.

‘The Black Place’ is the final poem, one which confirms that the collection will offer no soothing consolations, only the reassurance that if we, individually, are chilled by some of our possible futures then we are not alone in feeling this.

The collection is written within the time frame of cancer of the kidney, its diagnosis and treatment. It’s there from the first poem, ‘The C Word’, the poem in which Yoseloff states her aim: ‘To be blunt.’ The collection is divided into four parts by the positioning of the three ‘Redaction ‘ poems, poems which make loss visible by redacting most of their text so that the page is predominantly black, with only a few words — survivors from text taken from Understanding Kidney Cancer, published by Kidney Cancer UK — appearing out of the darkness. This works in its simplicity. These poems show; they don’t need to explain anything.

Although cancer is there at the outset the collection circles its subject, building up varieties of loss and images of despair. In ‘Alice in Hell’ the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland becomes ‘a throbby gullet’ like a CT or MRI scanner operated by malevolent animals; in ‘Anti-Midas’ we confront the archetype of capitalism: ‘Everything he touches turns to shit’. The tonal register is grey/black, as in the first of the O’Keeffe-referenced poems ‘Train at Night in the Desert’

Charcoal dark. Nothing to see but twin ghosts
of your face in safety glass, the man opposite
upholstered in thick fibres of slumber.

It’s an image simultaneously familiar and disturbing, and others follow: a house filled with the trophy skulls of hunted animals, an archaeological site filling with plastic bottles and Coke cans,. In ‘Emoji’ the poet ends ‘I dream/ of grey, or urban sprawl, in all/ its stupendous misery.’ These are poems which should be read in the order in which they are printed, to absorb the accumulation of unease and sense of a broken world. There is no escape, not even to a ‘Holiday Cottage’ in its rain-drenched reality —

We’re stuck to the window in wait
for the sun. It’s forecast on the app;
but the sky turns crow-dark, horrorshow.
There’s nowhere to go, even home

is sunk, the motorway stacked with
failed day-trippers, sopping girl guides.
The burger van has buggered off.
Trains wade in the wrong kind of rain.

It’s a metaphor for England, now, reduced to a ‘knock-off Hay Wain/ hung crooked over the hearth’. It doesn’t need a specific location, nor do other poems; they work at the level of emotional connection when, for example, we recognise the bleakness of a sleepless night, whether in hospital or at home. A poem like ‘Night Mode’, with its short lines in triplets as though existence is shrunk back to its essence, is universal in its feeling of helplessness and lack of autonomy.

Say you’re in transit — it sounds better.
Say you belief in indeterminacy.
No wrong answers just poor questions.

Incorporating other artists and their works keeps these poems looking outwards, beyond the immediate personal concerns, even when illness is haunting the edge of the poems. Yoseloff engages widely and often without placing the artwork in the foreground; her brief and helpful notes point to works and artists that have inspired her poems. ‘Inspired’ is her word for this, keeping the idea of inspiration current; I find it encouraging to see the power of art and its influence acknowledged, as well as seeing in her poems the ways in which artworks can inform a poem — and the imagination of the poet — without being immediately obvious. Her notes show her breadth of interest and curiosity — Tacita Dean Cy Twombly, Otto Prinsen among others. Online searching takes me on, to follow Yoseloff’s leads; it’s not essential to a reading of the collection, of course, but the way she incorporates the visual works, lightly, intrigues me.

The first three sections, their poems circling around the subject of cancer and the poet’s wider world, are a preparation for the long sequence ‘Cuts’, plus the title poem, that occupy the whole of the fourth section. Here only one word is left in ‘Redaction 3’, the same word repeated eight times: ‘blood’. The shock of diagnosis (‘carcinoma —/ the word a missile— ‘)and the realisation of what will be required in the treatment is shown in the syntax of the opening poem, where there is something both distanced and cautious in how the word is put into context.

He say we’ll cut it out, as if I’m made
of paper, and in a way, I am:
my chart spread out before him.

And where is a poet if not in the paper of books and print? Outside the hospital there’s more ‘paper’; public news, and a disaster: ‘… the Standard blasts/ Inferno — a tower fixed in flames.’ Grenfell Tower burned on 14 June 2017. During the next days these two events run in strange parallel as the radio delivers clichés that apply to both: ‘a ticking time bomb,/ a tragedy waiting to happen.’ While the radio and TV news probes the details (‘We’ve all become experts on cladding’) the poet has to probe (metaphorically) her own state of being: ‘I want to be all surface, nothing deep.’

Thirteen poems, all in the same fourteen-line format which gives a unity without constricting the poems. These aren’t sonnets as such, and the structure only reveals itself if you look underneath the surface of the meshed subjects; given the powerful nature of cancer and Grenfell Tower, and how words might cope with the horror of both, I would expect most readers to be held there, reading across the poems. The subjects overlap, moving towards the death of the photographer Khadija Saye in the fire, and the unnamed victims and their final texts. Below this runs the poet’s unanswered question ‘How can words ever mean enough?’

Perhaps The Black Place goes some way towards answering that question. Yoseloff has listened to voices other than her own, has caught their words and made poems that help us remember.

Last week I attended the launch of Tamar Yoseloff’s new collection, published by Seren Books. Tammy and I have known each other for a long while, are both published by Seren and, in her role at Hercules Editions, she has just published my own recent chapbook, Cargo of Limbs. So – in the small world of British poetry – I’m hardly an unconnected critic, but I have the benefit of having followed her work over the years, reviewing her most recent New and Selected, A Formula for Night (2015) here.

In an earlier blog post, I spoke – in rather tabloid-y terms – of the tension in Yoseloff’s poems between the “sassy and the sepulchral”. In 2007’s Fetch (Salt), there were “racy, blunt narratives” which in their exploration of female freedom, restraint and taboo made for vivid, exciting reading. The other side of her gift inclines to an “apocalyptic darkness”, a preoccupation with time, loss, the inability to hold the moment. In A Formula for Night, the poem ‘Ruin’ invented a form in which a text was gradually shot to pieces as phrases, even letters, were gradually edited out, displaying the very process of ruination. Interestingly, The Black Place develops this technique in 3 ‘redaction’ poems in which most of a text has been blacked out (cut out – see Yoko Ono later), leaving only a few telling words. A note indicates the source text in all three cases was the booklet Understanding Kidney Cancer and the author’s recent experience of illness is an important element in this new collection.

But unlike, for example, Lieke Marsman’s recent The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes (Pavilion Poetry, 2019 – discussed here), Yoseloff’s book is not dominated by the experience of illness (and one feels this is a deliberated choice). The book opens with ‘The C Word’ which considers the phonetic parts of the word ‘cancer’, as well as its appearance: “looks like carer but isn’t”. But – within its 12 lines – Yoseloff also considers the other C word, “detonated in hate / murmured in love”. The poem is really about how an individual can contain such divergent elements, “sites of birth / and death”. So unanticipated personal experience is here being filtered through the matrix of this writer’s naturally ambivalent gift.

Illness re-emerges explicitly later in the collection, but for much of it there is a business as usual quality and I, for one, am inclined to admire this:

I refuse the confessional splurge,
the Facebook post, the hospital selfie.
I’m just another body, a statistic,
nothing special. Everyone dies –

get over yourself.

So Yoseloff gives us a marvellous send-up of Edward Thomas’ ‘Adlestrop’ in ‘Sheeple’, a central place on the darker side of Yoseloff-country: “The heartland. Lower Slaughter”. There is urbanite humour in ‘Holiday Cottage’ with its “stygian kitchen”, bad weather, boredom and kitsch:

We stare at the knock-off Hay Wain
hung crooked over the hearth
and dream of England: the shire bells,
the box set, the M&S biscuit tin

‘The Wayfarer’ is one of many ekphrastic poems here – this one based on a Bosch painting – but the “sunless land” is patently an England on which “God looked down / and spat”. These are poems written in the last 3 years or so and, inevitably, Brexit impinges, most obviously in ‘Islanders’ (“We put seas between ourselves, / we won’t be rescued”) but the cityscape equally offers little in the way of hope. There is a caricaturing quality to the life lived there: everything “pixilates, disneyfies” (‘Emoji’) and gender relationships seem warped by inequitable power, by self-destructive urges and illness: “I’d super-shrink my dimensions, / wasting is a form of perfection” (‘Walk All Over Me’).

Perhaps ‘Girl’ shows us the figure of a survivor in such a hostile environment, her energy reflecting those female figures in Fetch – “a slip, a trick, a single polka dot” – but the darkness seems thicker now, the lack of lyricism, the impossibility of a happy ending more resolved:

She’s good for nothing because nothing’s
good: sirens drown out violins
and crows swoop to carnage in the street.

As the blurb says, the book boldly eschews the sentimental sop, the capitalist hype, for truths that are hard, not to say brutal. ‘Little Black Dress’ takes both the archetypal ‘girl’ and the author herself from teen years to widowhood in a dizzyingly rapid sonnet-length poem:

drunk and disorderly, dropping off bar stools one
by one, until the time arrives for widow’s weeds
and weeping veils, Ray-Bans darkening the sun.

And it is – unsurprisingly – mortality (the sepulchral) that eventually comes to the fore. A notable absence is the author’s mother, who has often been a powerful presence in previous books. Here she re-appears briefly in ‘Jade’. The stone is reputed to be efficacious in curing ailments of the kidneys and a jade necklace inherited from Yoseloff’s mother leads her to wonder about the inheritance of disease too: “a slow / release in her body, passed down, // down”. Both parents put in a fleeting appearance in the powerful sequence ‘Darklight’, the third part of which opens with the narrator standing in a pool of streetlight, “holding the dark / at bay”. She supposes, rather hopelessly, that “this must be what it’s like to have a god”. Not an option available to her; the dark holds monsters both within and without and not just for the child:

                                                Back then
my parents would sing me to sleep;

now they’re ash and bone. Our lives are brief
like the banks of candles in cathedrals,
each a flame for someone loved;

It’s these thoughts that further the careful structuring of this collection and return it to the experience of a life-threatening illness. ‘Nephritic Sonnet’ is an interrupted or cut off – 13 line – sonnet that takes us to the hospital ward, the I.V. tubes and – as she once said of the city – the poet finds “no poetry in the hospital gown”. Except, of course, that’s exactly what we get. 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 and also – in the sequence ‘Cuts’ – the powerful sense that (as quoted above) “I’m just another body, a statistic, / nothing special. Everyone dies”.

It’s this sense of being “nothing special” that enables ‘Cuts’ dispassionately to record very personal experiences of hospital procedures alongside the contemporaneous facts of the Grenfell Tower fire and (another ekphrastic element) a 1960s performance piece by Yoko Ono called ‘Cut Piece’. These elements are ‘leaned’ against each other in a series of 13 dismembered sonnets, each broken up into sections of 6/3/4/1 lines. The fragmentary, diaristic style works well though there are risks in equating personal illness with the catastrophic accident and vital political questions surrounding Grenfell. Ono’s performance piece offers a further example of victimhood, one more chosen and controllable perhaps. What’s impressive is how Yoseloff avoids the magnetic pull of the ego, displaying – if anything – a salutary empathy for others in the midst of her own fears.

The book is titled after a Georgia O’Keefe picture, reproduced on the cover. O’Keefe’s steady gaze into the darkness created by the jagged relief of the Navajo country is something to which Yoseloff aspires, though it “chills me / just to think it into being”. It is the ultimate reality – a nothing, le néant – though like the ultimate presence of other writers (Yves Bonnefoy’s le presence, for example), can at best only be gestured towards:

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.

Along such a difficult path, Yoseloff insists, O’Keefe’s art found “the bellow in a skull, / the swagger in a flower”. And, even in the most frightening brush with her own mortality, the poet will follow and does so in a way that is consistent with her own nature and work over many years.