New Poem by Tamar Yoseloff

Good news. Eyewear has a new poem today from Tamar Yoseloff's forthcoming fourth collection, The City with Horns, published by Salt in May 2011.

Yoseloff is also the author of Marks, with the artist Linda Karshan (Pratt Contemporary Art, 2007) and the editor of A Room to Live In: A Kettle's Yard Anthology (Salt, 2007). She lives in London where she teaches for the Poetry School.

The poem below is from a sequence about the American painter Jackson Pollock.

Connected

I wanted people to sit still

for one goddamn minute but they

flash through your life –

portraits are for the dead.

Trees construct themselves into a solid mass

as the horse picks up speed

see, everything's knotted

together

the way notes on a staff spell music, a factory

churns out things, each thing

itself, but also a component.

How easy it is when density

unlaces, and you find holes you can

crawl through –

light, a parting:

Navajo bucks round

a campfire, dancing

if I half-close my eyes, I can make them

leap straight in.

poem by Tamar Yoseloff; published online with permission of the author

Comments

Dennis Tomlinson said…

I like this. Yoseloff successfully relates Pollock's work to the physical world, whereas I normally find his paintings very hard to understand.

Wed Jan 19, 05:06:00 pm 2011

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