sheenaghpugh | Review of Belief Systems by Tamar Yoseloff, pub. Nine Arches Press 2024 (Reply)

A picture is more like the real world
when it’s made out of the real world.

Tamar Yoseloff has long been interested in poems that bounce off other art forms, witness her publishing company Hercules Editions, which specialised in the ekphrastic, often with illustrations. So it’s no surprise that she should produce a collection themed largely around paintings by Rauschenberg and music by Cage, with references also to other writers, artists and musicians – John Latham, Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns, among others. Indeed the sequence “Combines” is illustrated with the Rauschenberg paintings that inspired it.

I may as well admit at this point that I had never before seen (or in some cases heard) any work by most of these folk, not being much into modern art or classical music. I did consider disqualifying myself from reviewing the book on this account, but that would seem to imply that only readers with the requisite background knowledge of Lives and Works could enjoy the poems, and having read several previous collections by this poet, I knew she would not have written anything quite so niche. Indeed in “Bridges”, though the reference to Wordsworth resonates with anyone who recalls the relevant sonnet, without that knowledge we would still have a striking poem about London (another recurring theme of hers) during the covid lockdown:

      miss all those strangers, our city shut up
      like an oyster worrying its pearl,
      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 pandemic perhaps also lurks behind this collection’s consciousness of mortality:

      Prints of dogs and hooves,
     our heavy-soled shoes,
     pressed in sand until the first
     stiff wind – how simply
     we lift from earth.
     (“Common”)

The pessimistic description, in “New Year”, of

      the season of fresh starts,
     all those resolutions like cut pines
     lined up for the bin men

is characteristic of the first part of this collection, shadowed by a brooding sense of things coming to an end; not just individual lives, but also perhaps a way of life, menaced by both the pandemic and the environmental crisis of which the poet is conscious; “it’s time to say goodbye to easy days” (“Summer Fields”).

Even in this first part, there are many references to, and riffs off, other writers and artists. The second part, “Combines”, is an ekphrastic response to Rauschenberg’s hybrid works “bringing together painting and collage with an assemblage of cast-off objects”, each poem being accompanied by an illustration of the relevant work. He talked, apparently, of “working in the gap between art and life”, or as Yoseloff puts it in “Trophy V (for Jasper Johns)”:

A picture is more like the real world
when it’s made out of the real world.

In the variant sonnet “Trophy IV (for John Cage)”, we get a sense not only of Rauschenberg gaining inspiration from the thingness of things – “A stroke of paint means nothing much/ but a boot speaks of endless journeys” – but also of how artists, even in different fields, feed off each other:

    The composer gets a kick out of the artist
    striking a blow for rag and bone.

The third part of the collection consists of the long poem “Belief Systems”. This is itself something of a collage; it was written in response to the exhibition The Bard: William Blake at Flat Time House, and owes its genesis to Blake’s illustrations of Thomas Gray’s poems, which in turn inspired his own poem cycles; to the world-view of artist John Latham, and to events in 2020, notably Storm Brendan. Again therefore we have art feeding off art, but also off reality, particularly the cast-off and abandoned, and the shadow of ecological catastrophe from the book’s first section is present here as well – if anything, more desperate:

    nothing we’ve made will save us
    from what we’ve razed. When the foaming
    flood hits shore
    our time is up.
    *
    The storm collects our waste.
    Circuits bared, maps to nowhere.
    Analog screens, their ancient stars
    trapped in static. All of it shipped
    to Surabaya; farmers ditch failed crops,
    sift plastic for gold.

This is a brooding, urgent collection, the kind that both entertains and alarms. As I suspected, it is perfectly capable of being enjoyed without extensive background familiarity with Rauschenberg & Co, though the notes at the back are helpful and informative for those who want to mend their knowledge.