![]() Quote of the Day
Devotedly, unostentatiously, Carcanet has evolved into a poetry publisher whose independence of mind and largeness of heart have made everyone who cares about literature feel increasingly admiring and grateful.
Andrew Motion
|
|
Book Search
Subscribe to our mailing list
|
|
Sleepers AwakeOli Hazzard![]() 10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, British, Scottish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (136 pages) (Pub. Feb 2024) 9781800172999 £12.99 £11.69 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Feb 2024) 9781800173002 £10.39 £9.35 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
Oli Hazzard's third collection emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology. Its ambitious, formally various poems extract 'the ore / from boredom', as memory—personal, familial, social, historical—and the collective memory of poetry itself are wrenched out of shape by dramatic disruptions in rhythm, space and scale. The sadness and pain of forgetting is here too, alongside its unexpected forms of potential.
The title, borrowed from the Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata, catches the book's dreamy, kaleidoscopic, cross-temporal dialogues. Through satirical, allusive, tender, hopeful poems, Sleepers Awake makes spaces for intimacy with the reader, arguing 'through an off-key melody / for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure of live-drawing in sceptical company'.
'We might think of Sleepers Awake as a shimmer ecology of love, friendship and parenthood spun out in the momentary unfold of lyric noticing. The dramatised syncopes of a stanza break, a "crackling" of some new attention, draw us back into the minutiae of interest. The speaker turns towards others, towards the more-than-human, not to pin them down into taxonomy, but to want them there, co-present in the humming poem, memory players of nervous devices... Hazzard's lyrical proprioception feels into the superabundance of worldly memos as a kind of nature data, calling and connecting through obscurant histories of narrative, song and percussive accompaniment.'
Maria Sledmere, Oxford Poetry 'Hazzard's writing dramatises the nature of distractedness with compelling and compulsive humour... the disorientation of Sleepers Awake reflects a hazy state somewhere between sleeping and waking...' Rowland Bagnall, SPAM Plaza 'These poems are not "about" life, observed from afar; the poems themselves are life, distracted, irritated, stressed out, tender, displaced, scrolling and multitasking. Strange and ambitious, Sleepers Awake takes us to places we all know, but had forgotten were there.' Philip Terry, The Guardian 'A magician with language's innate opacities and hidden potentials, Oli Hazzard is one of our most consistently interesting and boundary-pushing poets. Sleepers Awake is a delight of "thorny wattage" that challenges, wrong-foots and rewards, offering new and tender glimpses of personal life caught up in larger constellations of thought. Hazzard is one of my essential poets.' Sarah Howe 'Within the kaleidoscopic tour de force of Sleepers Awake, we find the human, burdened, joyful, overwhelmed with desire, duty, bureaucracy and everyday life. Everything seems to be spinning, and also turning, and also moving outward into a larger register of being. So much so, the entire book is constantly reaching and manifest through an incisive and restless lyric address.' Peter Gizzi Praise for Oli Hazzard 'For Hazzard, language is not a shield, but a flexible and malleable tool in which new modes of expression are lurking... Blotter draws together many different texts and ideas in unpredictable ways, if not 'making it new' then making it original. It demands the reader's full attention, and is an enjoyable and compelling illustration of the wealth of possibilities inherent in language.' Chrissy Williams, Poetry London 'He has a musical ear, so there's randomness in the generation, but its composition bears careful listening to.' Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times, Twelve poets to read now 'A beautiful, bracing book of surprising, absorbing itineraries, Blotter takes brilliant soundings of linguistic pools and discursive surrounds. These astonishing, seductive sequences explore "how time is layered / into the paint". Hazzard is a formidably inventive poet; he is also a generous, playful, inviting one. He abolishes the distance between the conceptual and the lyrical, updating Wordsworth's "selection of the real language of men" for our GPS moment. His sequences bespeak their compositional procedures but also something irreducibly else: the poet in and of the hinge, the gap, the step, the scroll, the click, the synapse - a shaping and shaped tender intelligence. Like the most ambitious works of any era, Hazzard's poems create their own occasions and terms. They invite us to enter new fields, to go skying toward new horizons, to sense a lovers touch, to hear both "a lullaby" and "the shocking truth"'. Maureen N. McLane 'Haunting, hilarious, exquisitely inventive, Between Two Windows is a brilliant first collection by one of the brightest young stars in the poetic firmament.' Mark Ford 'Oli Hazzard brilliantly conveys the experience of experiencing; although his observations are hyper-real, he seems always to be questioning -- and to be making us question -- whether they are sufficiently 'like' ... His work perfectly exemplifies Touchstone's saying that the truest poetry is the most feigning.' Jane Griffiths 'Between Two Windows by Oli Hazzard is impressive in its formal assuredness and confidence of tone, all the while questioning what poetry is and does.' Adam Newey, Guardian |
Share this...
Quick Links
Carcanet Poetry
Carcanet Classics
Carcanet Fiction
Carcanet Film
Lives and Letters
PN Review
Video
Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years!
The Carcanet Blog
PN Review 278: Set 5: Mondo de Sunbrilo Translated by John Gallas
read more
Apple Thieves: Beverley Bie Brahic
read more
PN Review Creative Writing Prize: 'If Only Id Known Back Then' by Jack Morris
read more
Scattered Snows, to the North: Carl Phillips
read more
Gabriel Josipovici: Partita and A Winter in Zrau
read more
Why Are You Shouting?: James Womack
read more
![]() |
![]() We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
|
|
This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd
|