The city with horns - Tamar Yoseloff

"Every artist paints what he is", said Jackson Pollock, the iconic figure of the American Abstract Expressionist movement. His tumultuous life and his revolutionary vision provide the storyline for the main sequence of poems in The City with Horns, Tamar Yoseloff's fourth collection, in which Yoseloff plays ventriloquist to the voices of Pollock; his wife, the painter Lee Krasner; and his mistress, Ruth Kligman (who survived the car crash that killed him). The characters of James Dean, Frank O'Hara and William de Kooning are also woven into the narrative. And it is Pollock's dictum that provides the departure point for other poems which chart the attempt to find hidden meanings - whether through driving blind on a road at night, reading James Joyce in a Japanese restaurant, or gazing at a concrete wall. InThe City with Horns, you will find journeys through the poet's adopted city of London and through turbulent weather, on trains, into fields that conjure up the past, and around junk yards where treasure can be found. This is Yoseloff's most challenging collection to date.