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Between Two Windows

Oli Hazzard

Between Two Windows
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Categories: 21st Century, British, First Collections
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (80 pages)
(Pub. Sep 2012)
9781847771391
£9.95 £8.96
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(Pub. Sep 2012)
9781847776808
£9.95 £8.96
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Reviews
  • In Between Two Windows, his first book of poems, Oli Hazzard takes language out to stretch and flex and bend itself into new shapes. Into the formal straits of sestinas, sonnets and pantoums stray palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions and curiosities. His lyrics and satires dance in the spaces that open up between intention and expression, the moment when the horse attempts to throw its rider.

    I

    Moving In    
    The Inability to Recall the Precise Word for Something    
    True Romance    
    Rule of Thumb    
    Mid-Air    
    Apologia    
    Entre Chien et Loup    
    Home Poems    
    A Few Precepts    
    Some Shadows    
    Pantoum in Which Wallace Stevens Gives Me Vertigo    
    Two Versions of ‘Fabliau of Florida’    
    Badlands    
    Four Landscapes    
    Glasnost    
    Solfege    
    A Week in the Life    
    Are We Not Drawn Onward, We Few, Drawn Onward to New Era?    
    Outside    
    Prelude to Growth    


    II

    Sonnet    
    As Necessity Requires    
    Arrival    
    A Walking Bird     
    To Comprehend a Nectar    
    Carapace    
    The Asymmetric    
    Wyoming    
    In Absentia    
    A Later Stage of Discipline    
    With Hindsight    
    Three Summaries    
    Martedi Grasso    
    Manna    
    Old-Fashioned Uncouth Measurer    
    Sphinx    
    Leaving the City of Acupuncture    
    Kayak    


    Notes   
    Oli Hazzard is the author of two books of poems, Between Two Windows (Carcanet, 2012) and Blotter (Carcanet, 2018), and a novel, Lorem Ipsum (Prototype, 2021). He teaches at the University of St Andrews and lives in Glasgow. ... read more
    '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
    Praise for Oli Hazzard '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
     '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
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The Carcanet Blog Near-Life Experience: Rowland Bagnall read more The Silence: Gillian Clarke read more Baby Schema: Isabel Galleymore read more The Iron Bridge: Rebecca Hurst read more Sleepers Awake: Oli Hazzard read more The Miraculous Season: V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell read more
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