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- Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Seitenzahl: 42
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Belief Systems
Belief Systems
Tamar Yoseloff
ISBN: 978-1-913437-92-3
eISBN: 978-1-913437-93-0
Copyright © Tamar Yoseloff, 2024.
Artwork copyright © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Cover artwork: Robert Rauschenberg ‘Summerstorm’, 1959
© Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Tamar Yoseloff has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
First published June 2024 by:
Nine Arches Press
Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,
Great Central Way, Rugby.
CV21 3XH
United Kingdom
www.ninearchespress.com
Printed in the United Kingdom by:
Imprint Digital
Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Contents
New Year
Blue Rag Zine
Field Companions (isolation)
Heartsease
Common
Witch Touch
Summer Fields
Half Life
Field Companions (magic)
Bridges
Night held
Coyote in the Suburbs
Chirophobia
The Killer’s Hands
Ignition
Night opened in me an inn for phantoms
Nothing exists that is forever
Fault Lines
Combines
Canyon
Rhyme
Hymnal
Monogram
Bed
Factum
Trophy I (for Merce Cunningham)
Trophy IV (for John Cage)
Levee
Trophy V (for Jasper Johns)
Summerstorm
Painting with Grey Wing
Field Companions (time)
In Memory
25th February 1970
The painter in his prime
The Sea, No. 4
Right After
Suite for Two in Space and Time
Tacet
Field Companions (music)
Noise: A Lecture
In Concert
Weathers
Belief Systems
Artwork Captions
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the author and this book
Ideas are one thing and what happens is another
– John Cage
New Year
Cloud veils houses and cars,
the drowsy street.
Tears hang from bare
branches, small offerings
for the season of fresh starts,
all those resolutions like cut pines
lined up for the bin men;
for poems struck through,
a thought nearly born before words
disintegrate, brittle petals.
The forecast is bitter.
Cracks in the pavement
are wide enough to fall into
and there will be no one
to lift you, just a crow
sounding his old alarm.
Blue Rag Zine
1.
a slack clock melts frost
ferns crust the skirting board
the country gathered in vagrancy
before the stooping waif
he sinks in centuries of bracken
a clockwork of hedgerows
deep blows
he lives in
forgotten glades and gullies
grassy pirate hideouts
demands his own sun’s century
footprints loosening time’s edge
2.
morning ploughs brown furrows
in his mind
distant silver moments
half-wild with regret
he turns his back on man
slopes into the field
land tracked in secrecy
earth wears his touch
thorns each strut
his life numbered and shut
Field Companions
mestostics after John Cage
(isolation)
Only in caves and houses
do we thrive, in fretting circles
or bubbles, we feed on
what we can forage, plants
and slower creatures;
death arrives for
those who can’t adapt.
We dine on mushrooms, pale
flesh flaking on our
lips, their nutty vigour
nourishing our resolve. We will fight
someone shouts, raising a fist
but defeat is easier
bending into wind
like a yew in a graveyard, its roots
clutching bones;
into remembrance we dissolve
for parasites
and nervous violets,
not an end
just another cycle.
Heartsease
Outside they run riot, sprout
where they can in the glare of noon;
they don’t need tending or care,
don’t care about us
when we’re down on our luck,
little pansy faces giggling.
We demand they cure our ills,
stir thoughts of love –
enough of them, a fast death
once cut. Who wants to be
cooped up with their sweet reek,
their sentimental pose?
They live with or without
our passion, find their feast
in air, in the new-turned soil
on our graves.
Common
To walk here now
you’d think we’d given up:
all dried-out fern and brush,
knotted brambles
blackbird-stripped.
Little glots of bullace
pucker on the tree,
choice fruits lace its canopy
just beyond our reach.
Prints of dogs and hooves,
our heavy-soled shoes,
pressed in sand until the first
stiff wind – how simply
we lift from earth.
Witch Touch
Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars . . .
— Henry David Thoreau
A stain of life
clasping brick in this park
edged by traffic.
Tough growth,
flourishing unnoticed
as it fruits: it will live out
land grabs, viruses, wars,
its sharp constellations
spreading
*
No one comes here anymore,
not in a month of Sundays.
I’m wearing that yellow dress,
my hair matted with twigs
from the place where we lay
in the long grass under the yews.
You are a stone dog keeping vigil
for its owner, hoarding secrets,
