Tamar Yoseloff

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Biographical note:  Tamar Yoseloff was born in the US in 1965. Her first collection, Sweetheart (Slow Dancer Press, 1998) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and the winner of the Aldeburgh Festival Prize. She received a New Writers’ Award from London Arts for her second collection, Barnard’s Star (Enitharmon Press, 2004). In 2005 she was Writer in Residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge, as part of their Year in Literature Festival. She is the Programme Co-ordinator and a tutor for The Poetry School. She divides her time between London and Suffolk, and is currently working on her first novel.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712915
ISBN:  9781844712915
Author:  Tamar Yoseloff
Title:  Fetch
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  19-Apr-07
Extent:  76pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  114 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Tamar Yoseloff’s third collection combines poignant, sensual and evocative poems with the voyeuristic intensity of an internal émigré. Whether she is observing coastal resorts out of season, lovers in a restaurant or disparate train journeys, she captures the bittersweet isolation of the lyric moment. Her characteristically painterly eye for colour, tone and form is balanced with erotic encounters as well as powerful narratives exploring loss, threat and betrayal.

Meet the author

Podcasts

Play Shadow (700 KB)


Play Tiger (888 KB)


Play Silk (728 KB)


Play The Sea at Aberystwyth (900 KB)

Table of contents:
Fetch
Polaroid
Black Water
Illumination
Shadow
The Seal
Gorse
Spring
St Ives
The Beginning of Winter
Interior with a Woman Playing the Virginals
Fetch
The Firing
Vaporetto in Winter
The Library
The Visitants
Tiger
Shallott
Fungi
Fetch
Siesta
The Blue Moon
The Venetian Mirror
The Angle of Error
Road
The Dentist
Lamb Pasanda
Silk
Portrait of a Couple Looking at a Turner Landscape
The Red Hill
Fetch
Voyage
Marks
Fetch
The Sea at Aberystwyth

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Excerpt from book:  

Tiger

He stalks the wilds of the duvet
in this nil-star hotel room,
just a double bed and a bidet.

On the street, the ladies of the Barbès
saunter in five-inch heels, buy
Medjool dates, long okra fingers,

the men bask in a cloud of Gauloises,
drink sweet coffee that leaves a sludge
in the cup. Two floors up

you sing to me of drunken sailors,
whores straddling the harbour;
your fingers tease guitar strings.

I whisper to you how the foie gras
slipped down my throat,
the Sauternes, silk on my tongue.

Beneath the tiger’s eye, your hand
is moving up my thigh. I am all
polished spruce, catgut,

you make me sing. We recreate ourselves
as Cubists, intersect tongues and limbs,
pliant and supple, animal.

Unpublished endorsement :  Tamar Yoseloff’s Fetch is a delicate book of haunting strength, of strangeness uncontained. These poems are irresistible.

Alison Brackenbury

Unpublished endorsement :  These are dark poems in the best sense of the word, edgy, unnerving, but glittering, too. Tamar Yoseloff can make a visit to the dentist or a lamb curry sexy and sinister. I've followed her career from the beginning; Fetch is her most ambitious book yet, and her best.

Matthew Francis

Unpublished endorsement :  These compressed and vivid poems have a mind and a music all their own. Tamar Yoseloff is emerging as one of the best poets of her generation.

Thomas Lux