Tamar Yellin
Early youthful poems (1976-1984) of Tamar Yellin first published in 2020.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tamar-yellin/
When I continue to read this book in due course, I hope to give some thoughts upon it in the comment stream below…
THIS IS PART TWO OF MY REVIEW AS CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/03/25/poems-tamar-yellin/
November 11th 1977
“The leaves are gathering at the door”
This feels like an uncanny presage of a house now disguised as the poet’s memory of a housedog’s instinct or the then present truth, an initial germ of HOUSE OF LEAVES (2000), then other ‘strange house’ works…echoing those more traditional houses of yore.
Become strange, that is, in hindsight of what we have all read since? Including this poem fatefully read today when I have been thinking of such things.
Song
November 18th 1977
A cosiness by firelight, and a million reflections of the moon through a gap in the curtain.
Old fashioned with sung legends, if not, I guess, with right-angular cosines in the patterns of dew!
February 26th 1978
Hardy, Farjeon, ancient leaves, ’trusty rakes’, sap, then more cosiness as sat by an inner fire.
These poems seem to have a unique flavour of naivety and maturity as one.
Perhaps the only way a poet can instinctively achieve that is when still young whilst somehow harbouring a preternatural future age yet to be lived in real-time, if not then.
April 13th 1978
“And some feel near, and some feel far,
But all are are eremites.”
The fateful stoicism of life, be it oblivion or immortality. Without a star to guide thee, one, among millions, who knoweth the word eremite!
A strong enough soul to transcend everything, and with words to spare.
Seriously, another substantive poem, and I am really becoming attached to this callow poet’s deep soul.
April 20th 1978
The poet making her peace with an imperfect life — an ironic Null Immortalis plea for durable time and for life not to expect her to weaken in her resolve to hang onto it, whatever its snares or the snares created by equally fallible mankind who were created by that life….
Four line stanzas, mostly rhyming abab, the exception being grave and have in the first stanza!
June 9th 1978
The inspiration of a masterful wind to make the poet mistress of stoical failures and their concomitant successes. Take the ingredients of Panglossian fate whence one can, without prejudice or false principles. This is the instinctive pattern that suitably fulfils the overall pattern or gestalt of all of us, the more of us who adopt, in our lives, this attitude of fair acceptance and battle. Not sure if this short poem says all that, but that’s what it made me write straight after reading it!
June. 12th 1978
In many ways these are remarkable poems in their own right without context. And remarkable, in a different way, when given the then age of the poet.
Feisty and fateful, stoical and breezy.
Giving a kick up the butt, too, of the (anagrammatic?) “Idle, wicked wiles!”
July 20th 1978
“The Simple and the Seem”
That line would make an excellent title for someone’s novel!
Not only for this poem’s ghost.
7th September 1978
“Things can never be, they only seem.”
This is a mighty poem for our age. The most powerful so far in this book for our Covid age, all these years later?
Grasp this poet, capture not her but her words.
“I think I’d laugh to see your bolted door
If I were free to be infinitude.”
7th September 1978 (another)
Another striking poem.
The only insane one, in a country otherwise of the sane, is the only true sane one?
A red letter day that date in September!
September 8th 1978
Yearning for the golden haze of childhood, when the poet is still tantamount to a child?!
September 25th 1978
The perfect poem for me today, as if it were written about me all those years ago by someone who didn’t know me.
It is as if I am the old man here in his garden, although my garden is gestalt real-time reviewing.
Presumptuous, of me, I know. But every reader has at least temporary rights over the work read.
September 29th 1978
“I know a glade where the fairies play
In the afternoon of a dreaming day.”
An exquisite poem describing the weathery wind and the playful escapements of fantasy or dream worthy of de la mare or dunsany.
The promise of future and past works embodied here already…including this poet’s own.
October 7th 1978
An ironic curative counterpart to ‘Man-size in Marble’ that I just happened to read and review a few minutes ago here. Both of them in October, both catharses in hindsight synergy.
Yesterday’s “And sometimes I am frightened / By musings in my head —“ comes home to roost today: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/the-demon-lover/
October 16th 1978
These poems are often “Racked by the wind”, today’s “coughing and weary”, as well as healed by positive stoicism, the alchemy of feeble to noble.
October 22nd 1978
An ecstasy or epiphany, again involving wind, and, here, Autumn, too.
October 24th 1978
Possibly the most striking poem about a house dog that you will ever find, coupled with an intrinsic positive epiphany from stoicism filtered through seeming feebleness…
October 28th 1978
“What a prize!”
The apotheosis of this book’s wind, if now dubbed a sweetly-tempered, travelling breeze from highland fells to the open window of my lockdown.
October 30th 1978
“And people walk unseeing, and they crowd
In liquid sadness, false hilarity.”
A ‘gem-dew’ of a highly mature poem, no germ yet due then, deriving epiphany from a stoical misanthropy, even while hinting at prophesying a vision of thusly fallible people bowed over their mobiles.
November 3rd 1978
“I am the wind”
The apotheosis of self-pantheism.
Mature poetry with instinctive poetic skills (take, as just one example, the brilliant first line!), skills that escape better known poets.
November 5th 1978
“We are worn through by sadness and by mirth
And beaten to our last receptacle.”
On Guy Fawkes day, apparently, a bonfire is movingly used as a metaphor for life and death as seen by this adept young poet.
November 7th 1978
“Heaving heaviness…”
A sensually felt synergy of icy soul and warm prehensile body. Remarkable poem; they seem to get even more remarkable as 1978 inevitably draws to its close.
This review will now continue here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/24864-2/