Tamar Yoseloff - The City with Horns

Tamar Yoseloff, The City with Horns (Salt)

The City with Horns is the title of the middle of three sections to Tamar Yoseloff's new book which is an involving account of the life of Jackson Pollock. We also see Rothko, Kerouac and Ginsberg among the maniac, generically-styled beats all having their wild times as well as Frank O'Hara, the nice, sensible one.Pollock is macho, atavistic and potentially dangerous. Yoseloff's achievement is to express him in such detached and yet vivid poems. In the aftermath of his turbulent life, his paintings are,

the way the galaxy might look to a man stranded

in space, before science and logic takes hold.

Either side of this central section are poems called City Winter and Indian Summer. The first contains the more successful poems, for me Invisible Nearby Sea taking the unpromising theme of sitting next to a fat bloke on a bus and making something quite special from it. Their proximity leads the two passengers to some imagined recognition of each other's background,

And he will sense that I carry

the stagnant air of shuttered rooms, stalled lifts,

the slow creep of complacency. But still

it rises from tarmac to find us, clings

to our skin: that saline longing

for somewhere else.

Blackwork is about embroidery that mourns a lost lover to charming sixteenth century effect and City Winter itself is a fine meditation with a satisfying sense of loss.

Perhaps in other places the observation is a little prosaic, the Mannequins on 7th Street or the seemingly mundane thoughts on Stamps that might or might not be recovered by a nice ending. The third section involves a fair amount of poetic fading, losing and escaping, the highlight being Jetty, which turns out to be considerably better than Peter Doig's painting once you've googled it but both capture the increasing dark, the reducing view, the turning in on oneself that both nighttime and ageing inevitably bring.

It's a considerable book, evocative and confidently made. It is urban poetry with various hints of glamour and degradation, in each sense of the word.