The Black Place

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