The Black Place E-Book

Tamar Yoseloff

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 40

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The Black Place is dark and gorgeously multi-faceted artwork, like a black diamond. Tamar Yoseloff is a gifted contrarian: she eschews the sentimental, embraces alternatives, and offers us antidotes to cheery capitalist hype. But there is a dark grandeur to her view of mortality, one that matches the sublime desert painting of the same name by Georgia O'Keeffe which inspires the title poem. The book's central sequence is 'Cuts', which is a characteristically tough look at the poet's cancer diagnosis and treatment: "The consultant says 'carcinoma' – the word a missile…". The diagnosis arrives at the same time as the Grenfell Tower disaster, a public trauma overshadowing a private one. These poems focus on the strangeness of the illness, they refuse to offer panaceas or consolations. Also included are some formally inventive 'redacted' poems that are blacked-out except for key words that float ominously within their depths. Tamar Yoseloff has moved the horror poem into the twenty-first century mainstream. These poems are tough but not mere gore; the first step towards a humane society is to visit its back alleys at midnight. 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

Leseprobe

The Black Place

Tamar Yoseloff

Seren is the book imprint ofPoetry Wales Press Ltd.57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AEwww.serenbooks.comfacebook.com/SerenBookstwitter@SerenBooks

The right of Tamar Yoseloff to be identified asthe author of this work has been asserted in accordancewith the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Tamar Yoseloff, 2019.

ISBN: 978-1-78172-559-7ebook: 978-1-78172-564-1

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

Cover artwork: ‘Black Place IV’ (1944) by Georgia O’Keeffe© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS 2019.

Cover design: Andrew Lindesay

Author photograph: Stephen Wells

Printed in Bembo by Severn, Gloucester.

Contents

The C Word

Dawn

Girl

Alice in Hell

Anti-midas

The Lambeth Prophecy

Basement

In Clover

Train at Night in the Desert

Bearskull

The Treasury of Alonis

Redaction 1

Heart Burn

Walk All Over Me

Emoji

City

Occupation Road

Sheeple

Holiday Cottage

The Wayfarer

Snails

Islanders

Night Mode

Redaction 2

Disappointment

Body Language

Little Black Dress

Climacteric

Jade

Absent Friends

Frits De Vries’s Great Work

Darklight

Small White Dot

Nephritic Sonnet

Redaction 3

Cuts

The Black Place

Notes

Acknowledgements

The Black Place was the name Georgia O’Keeffe gave to one of her favorite painting sites, located in the Bisti Badlands in Navajo country, about 150 miles northwest of her home in Ghost Ranch. It was a stretch of desolate gray and black hills that the artist said looked from a distance like “a mile of elephants.”

Isolated far off the road and away from all civilization, O’Keeffe made several camping trips there in the 1940s, with her assistant Maria Chabot. Writing to Alfred Stieglitz in 1944, the year Black Place II was made, Chabot described in words what O’Keeffe captured in paint: “. . . the black hills – black and grey and silver with arroyos of white sand curving around them – pink and white strata running through them. They flow downward, one below the next.Incredible stillness!”

from georgiaokeeffe.net

When I was sick they moved me to a room with a window and suddenly through the window I saw two fir trees in a park, and the grey sky, and the beautiful grey rain, and I was so happy. It had something to do with being alive.

Joan Mitchell

The C Word

catches in the throat; the first syllable

on its own, enabling, followed by a hissing snake,

rattletail bringing up the rear.

It trumpets its presence in the glare of the ward,

sneaks into glossy brochures, flashes its statistics

(the odds are against me), looks like carer but isn’t.

Not to be confused with the other c word

that cuts at both ends, detonated in hate

murmured in love – how can it be both?

And how can I contain them, sites of birth

and death? I should know how to speak

of what’s inside me. To be blunt.

Dawn

The city stirs, planes drown out birds,

the fox cries like a strangled child

over the uncertain street. Not a soul.

Each day I lose more: words,

names, things I thought I cared about.

The sun does its duty, as it should

but dawn still holds on to night

like a blanket covering a body.

Poppies stamp the lawn, loud as fists,

but their petals are widow’s skin.

I’ll lie down in their red caress, let them

stroke my cheek, black eyes winking.

Girl

comes from nowhere, no great shakes –

a slip, a trick, a single polka dot

dancing on her own. In the swoosh

of the train she is gone, to trip

the switch of her heart, to fill the gap –

mind you, she’s been there before

and it sucks. She’s stuck on night shift,

flashing her dugs, doing her bit

and for what? No one

gets it – she holds her tongue

but slippy lizard can’t be tamed,

sliding over cusses, tequila, semen.

She’s good for nothing because nothing’s

good: sirens drown out violins

and crows swoop to carnage in the street.

Alice in Hell

And then the White Queen said

off with her head!

Down the hole I went,

plunged into a throbby gullet;

crocodile tears spiked my arms,

drew rubies, price of my dewy flesh.

That infernal rabbit kept muttering

you’re late, you’re late, and in a beat

I knew I was dead, but not

in the pearly place.

The Hatter, murderer of time,

wielded the second hand

like a stiletto, rosy juice flew

through the picket pikes on my skin,

my mouth swilled rare claret,

thick elixir of my heart. I longed

to wake, caught in the crease