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, is always offering us antidotes to cheery capitalist hype. But there is a sort of 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 central sequence in this collection 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 fire disaster, a public trauma overshadowing a private one. These poems focus on the strangeness of the illness, they refuse to offer panaceas or consolations. There are also some formally inventive ‘redacted’ poems that are blacked-out except for key words that float ominously within their depths.