Ekphrastic poetry needs, I believe, to have a link to its source material which is suitably strong and to some degree self-evident in order for it to work. The twelve poems sitting alongside images of Robert Rauschenberg’s work which are at the heart of Tamar Yoseloff’s Belief Systems for me just fail to hit the mark. Just. (I understand why this section has a dedicated title, ‘Combines’, but surely Nine Arches should also have given a title to the sections that both precede and follow it… That’s my editor voice talking.)
The collection as a whole is, I think, a little uneven: ‘Half Life’, ‘Bridges’ and ‘In Memory’ are great, but the ‘Field Companions’ poems are dwarfed by being an exercise in cleverness (and include a formatting error by the publisher in the final line of the penultimate one and two inconsistencies in the last poem). And ‘Noise: A Lecture’ – whilst I can see the theory behind the layout – is just gimmickry. How the hell do you read it, either in your head or aloud? (Yes, I know that’s the point, but the words should be strong enough to do the heavy lifting without relying on gimmick. Indeed, they may indeed be strong enough – but I couldn’t be bothered to even try to read them…)
Ian Gouge - Writer 