Poetry review – BELIEF SYSTEMS: Paul McDonald praises Tamar Yoseloff’s new collection of ekphrastic poetry for its imagination and inventiveness
Belief Systems
Nine Arches
Tamar Yoseloff
ISBN: ?978-1784633172
£12.99
Belief Systems is Tamar Yoseloff’s seventh poetry collection, following a string of successful books that began with Sweetheart (1998), winner of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and a PBS Commendation. Belief Systems, a PBS Recommendation, feels like the kind of book that might receive further accolades. It opens with “New Year”, which ostensibly offers a rather bleak outlook for the future: ‘Cloud veils houses and cars’, with ‘all those resolutions like cut pines / lined up for the bin men’; it closes:
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.
As opening poems go, it promises little in terms of hope, aside perhaps from the compensatory beauty of the poem itself. Earlier stanzas allude to draft poems that have been ‘struck through’, suggesting that creative frustration informs this pessimism, but “New Year” itself achieves the status of art, with its measured phrasing and charged, arresting imagery. The use of the second person distances the speaker from the mindset she explores, creating a detachment that implies objective description rather than subjective confession: the poem doesn’t feel like therapy, in other words. It’s more like an attempt to render a state-of-mind as a thing to be explored and appreciated as art. Whilst not explicitly about art, this poem sets the tone for a book that takes art, particularly visual art, as its principal theme.
Some Yoseloff poems adopt the perspective of artists, as with “Summer Fields”, inspired by Joan Eardley’s painting of that name. Yoseloff takes her lead from Eardley’s practice of occupying the same location for multiple artworks, becoming almost part of the landscape she paints: it suggests a felt connection with the exterior world, her ‘hand / understanding what the mind can’t grasp’. For an artist, this sense of identification comes with a degree of responsibility:
Glory be to field, to sun, to the harvest
that will feed the farmer, his brood, this village
and the next. But I must also paint the storm
that shades the sky, lifts a chill that breathes
little whispers on my skin - a sign
it's time to say goodbye to easy days.
The importance of authenticity, of being true to connections between the self and the natural world, was key to Eardley’s aesthetic – she mixed grass into her paint, for instance, in order to reinforce such links. But fidelity to nature also demands a commitment to the ‘storm / that shades the sky’, as well as summer sun and bountiful harvests: artists can’t be squeamish about confronting the less ‘easy days’; as seen with the speaker of “New Year”, forecasts are sometimes ‘bitter’.
In “Bridges” Yoseloff quotes Joan Mitchell to connect her poem with Mitchell’s abstract masterpiece, The Bridge: ‘A bridge to me is beautiful,’ Mitchell tells us, ‘I like the idea of getting from one side to the other’. Mitchell’s painting is a diptych, divided at the centre, and Yoseloff’s poem deals partly with those who don’t make it across such divides. She recalls a student ‘who threw herself off Lambeth Bridge one night’, and, referencing “The Waste Land”, ‘death undoing Friday crowds / on London Bridge’. Bridges have less positive connotations for Yoseloff than for Mitchell, then, and her death imagery is developed further at the end of the poem as the speaker herself experiences a form of death in life:
as I stick to my grid, never venturing
far enough to find the river's glint –
all that mighty heart, as the poet said,
stopped, the monitor switched off.
The ‘poet’ referenced here, of course, is Wordsworth, whose “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” conjures the sleeping houses where Londoners, the City’s ‘mighty heart’, are missing out on the beautiful morning. However, Yoseloff’s stasis – her death in life – is born of complacency or fear, rather than slumber: she sticks to the ‘grid’ that circumscribes and defines her life, never crossing the line ‘from one side to the other’, or the frame that traps her. This poem changes how I see Mitchell’s painting. Returning to the source with Yoseloff’s words in mind, I see the divide at the heart of her diptych in a new way, and Mitchell’s hectic tangle of diagonal and horizontal lines signify differently, suggesting stagnation as much as momentum, anxiety as much as utility. For me, Yoseloff’s “Bridges” helps unpack the latent ambiguity of The Bridge. Thus, like the best ekphrastic poems, Yoseloff’s piece serves as a creative intervention: Mitchell’s painting, like bridges themselves, remain ‘beautiful’, but in ways that create space for darker emotions.
Belief Systems includes poems inspired by Christo wrappings, Sara Haq drawings, William Blake illustrations, John Cage mesostics, Imogen Holst compositions, and much else besides; but at its heart there are a dozen poetic responses to Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, the series of hybrid artworks he constructed between 1954-1964. The artworks are reproduced in colour to be viewed in juxtaposition with Yoseloff’s poems, which is a real joy. I loved these thoughtful, inventive reflections on Rauschenberg: his attempts to collapse distinctions between categories like sculpture, collage and painting lend themselves to poetic interpolation, with Yoseloff’s words becoming another element in each combine. Of particular interest to me is Trophy V (for Jasper Johns), a combine incorporating oil, fabric, a cardboard box, printed paper, a plastic ruler, and a metal-frame window on canvas. Yoseloff’s response opens with Rauschenberg apparently addressing his old lover, Jasper Johns: ‘A picture is more like the real world / when it’s made out of the real world’; and from here Rauschenberg goes on to undermine the possibility of realism, and perhaps figurative art itself:
so I can’t paint your portrait, fix
your face to canvas when you exist
in endless motion like Duchamp’s nude,
descending the stairs in twos
Yoseloff has Rauschenberg expand on this apparent descriptive impasse, making a case for his nonfigurative tribute to Johns, and modern art in general:
You dreamed of the stars
and stripes, but your grab-bag flag stands
for this room, this minute,
the state we inhabit,
surrounded by all the things men break
which we make whole.
Art such as Jasper Johns’s ‘grab-bag flag’ has meaning because it ‘stands for’ the ‘real world’ and ‘the state we inhabit’, not because it is it, or even resembles it. It’s the ‘dream’ – the creative act – that makes art and reality ‘whole’, at least insofar as it facilitates the integration we might associate with meaning. But this creative act is never over: given that reality exists ‘in endless motion like Duchamp’s nude’ it must continue to be remade by the creative and critical minds that engage with and interpret it. In having Rauschenberg make a case for his and Johns’s art, Yoseloff makes a case for her own: her creative/critical intervention adds its own imaginative contribution to the combine, remaking/repurposing it in her own way, in her own cultural moment, for the benefit of us in ours. This is what all the ekphrastic poems in this book strive to do, and in my opinion they succeed.
Yoseloff is an intelligent poet who draws on her critical acumen and creative imagination to great effect in Belief Systems. It is in every sense a beautiful book, with Nine Arches’s suburb production values complementing the high quality contents. Art lovers in particular will relish it.
Sep 30 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Tamar Yoseloff
Poetry review – BELIEF SYSTEMS: Paul McDonald praises Tamar Yoseloff’s new collection of ekphrastic poetry for its imagination and inventiveness
Belief Systems is Tamar Yoseloff’s seventh poetry collection, following a string of successful books that began with Sweetheart (1998), winner of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and a PBS Commendation. Belief Systems, a PBS Recommendation, feels like the kind of book that might receive further accolades. It opens with “New Year”, which ostensibly offers a rather bleak outlook for the future: ‘Cloud veils houses and cars’, with ‘all those resolutions like cut pines / lined up for the bin men’; it closes:
As opening poems go, it promises little in terms of hope, aside perhaps from the compensatory beauty of the poem itself. Earlier stanzas allude to draft poems that have been ‘struck through’, suggesting that creative frustration informs this pessimism, but “New Year” itself achieves the status of art, with its measured phrasing and charged, arresting imagery. The use of the second person distances the speaker from the mindset she explores, creating a detachment that implies objective description rather than subjective confession: the poem doesn’t feel like therapy, in other words. It’s more like an attempt to render a state-of-mind as a thing to be explored and appreciated as art. Whilst not explicitly about art, this poem sets the tone for a book that takes art, particularly visual art, as its principal theme.
Some Yoseloff poems adopt the perspective of artists, as with “Summer Fields”, inspired by Joan Eardley’s painting of that name. Yoseloff takes her lead from Eardley’s practice of occupying the same location for multiple artworks, becoming almost part of the landscape she paints: it suggests a felt connection with the exterior world, her ‘hand / understanding what the mind can’t grasp’. For an artist, this sense of identification comes with a degree of responsibility:
The importance of authenticity, of being true to connections between the self and the natural world, was key to Eardley’s aesthetic – she mixed grass into her paint, for instance, in order to reinforce such links. But fidelity to nature also demands a commitment to the ‘storm / that shades the sky’, as well as summer sun and bountiful harvests: artists can’t be squeamish about confronting the less ‘easy days’; as seen with the speaker of “New Year”, forecasts are sometimes ‘bitter’.
In “Bridges” Yoseloff quotes Joan Mitchell to connect her poem with Mitchell’s abstract masterpiece, The Bridge: ‘A bridge to me is beautiful,’ Mitchell tells us, ‘I like the idea of getting from one side to the other’. Mitchell’s painting is a diptych, divided at the centre, and Yoseloff’s poem deals partly with those who don’t make it across such divides. She recalls a student ‘who threw herself off Lambeth Bridge one night’, and, referencing “The Waste Land”, ‘death undoing Friday crowds / on London Bridge’. Bridges have less positive connotations for Yoseloff than for Mitchell, then, and her death imagery is developed further at the end of the poem as the speaker herself experiences a form of death in life:
The ‘poet’ referenced here, of course, is Wordsworth, whose “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” conjures the sleeping houses where Londoners, the City’s ‘mighty heart’, are missing out on the beautiful morning. However, Yoseloff’s stasis – her death in life – is born of complacency or fear, rather than slumber: she sticks to the ‘grid’ that circumscribes and defines her life, never crossing the line ‘from one side to the other’, or the frame that traps her. This poem changes how I see Mitchell’s painting. Returning to the source with Yoseloff’s words in mind, I see the divide at the heart of her diptych in a new way, and Mitchell’s hectic tangle of diagonal and horizontal lines signify differently, suggesting stagnation as much as momentum, anxiety as much as utility. For me, Yoseloff’s “Bridges” helps unpack the latent ambiguity of The Bridge. Thus, like the best ekphrastic poems, Yoseloff’s piece serves as a creative intervention: Mitchell’s painting, like bridges themselves, remain ‘beautiful’, but in ways that create space for darker emotions.
Belief Systems includes poems inspired by Christo wrappings, Sara Haq drawings, William Blake illustrations, John Cage mesostics, Imogen Holst compositions, and much else besides; but at its heart there are a dozen poetic responses to Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, the series of hybrid artworks he constructed between 1954-1964. The artworks are reproduced in colour to be viewed in juxtaposition with Yoseloff’s poems, which is a real joy. I loved these thoughtful, inventive reflections on Rauschenberg: his attempts to collapse distinctions between categories like sculpture, collage and painting lend themselves to poetic interpolation, with Yoseloff’s words becoming another element in each combine. Of particular interest to me is Trophy V (for Jasper Johns), a combine incorporating oil, fabric, a cardboard box, printed paper, a plastic ruler, and a metal-frame window on canvas. Yoseloff’s response opens with Rauschenberg apparently addressing his old lover, Jasper Johns: ‘A picture is more like the real world / when it’s made out of the real world’; and from here Rauschenberg goes on to undermine the possibility of realism, and perhaps figurative art itself:
Yoseloff has Rauschenberg expand on this apparent descriptive impasse, making a case for his nonfigurative tribute to Johns, and modern art in general:
Art such as Jasper Johns’s ‘grab-bag flag’ has meaning because it ‘stands for’ the ‘real world’ and ‘the state we inhabit’, not because it is it, or even resembles it. It’s the ‘dream’ – the creative act – that makes art and reality ‘whole’, at least insofar as it facilitates the integration we might associate with meaning. But this creative act is never over: given that reality exists ‘in endless motion like Duchamp’s nude’ it must continue to be remade by the creative and critical minds that engage with and interpret it. In having Rauschenberg make a case for his and Johns’s art, Yoseloff makes a case for her own: her creative/critical intervention adds its own imaginative contribution to the combine, remaking/repurposing it in her own way, in her own cultural moment, for the benefit of us in ours. This is what all the ekphrastic poems in this book strive to do, and in my opinion they succeed.
Yoseloff is an intelligent poet who draws on her critical acumen and creative imagination to great effect in Belief Systems. It is in every sense a beautiful book, with Nine Arches’s suburb production values complementing the high quality contents. Art lovers in particular will relish it.