Böcker av Oz Hardwick

In My Life as a Time Traveller, Oz Hardwick pushes the idea of memoir into dazzlingly unexpected territories, foregrounding pattern and imaginative perception over anecdote.Oz is known for prose poems that are "relentlessly thoughtful about the nature of time," and which "play with time ... with highly compelling, disconcerting results," and has recently been described as "an Einstein of prose poetry, reconfiguring our understanding of time and space". The 18 Discrete Fragments in this poetry sequence mix past, present, and future into a heady alchemical compound that distils each moment into the gold of sand, egg yolk, or a falling autumn leaf.The Surrealist dream logic of the poems here is born from reflection on the nature of the self within the world when one is revealed to be one's own most unreliable narrator. In a rare instance of explanation, Oz reveals that "one of the more interesting/infuriating ways in which my brain works is that I don't have a neurotypical perception of linear time: it is, as the film says, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and these poems offer vignettes of that experience."Precisely focused, and shaped with Oz's customary mastery of craft, these poems are personal on the molecular level at which, paradoxically, individuality becomes universal. Together, they amount to a memoir of now, in which "now" is the fourteenth century, where a dodo that grew from a seed, grown weary of browsing art galleries, slips his half-forgotten children from the freezer, and contemplates retirement. We've all been there, and in this wildly implausible collection, Oz presents an irrefutable case which suggests that we're all there now.

Oz Hardwick lives in York, England. He is a poet, photographer, musician, and academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published nine full collections and chapbooks, including Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and most recently the prose poetry sequence Wolf Planet (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2020). He has also edited or co-edited several anthologies, including The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) with Anne Caldwell. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.

Hesiod's Five Ages famously proides a vision of the decline of human society that has resonated for many centuries. In this anthology, five poets take Hesiod's versions of the golden, silver, bronze, heroic and iron ages as their starting points to craft five individual 'chapbooks' of prose poetry - not only exploring notions from Hesiodbut also venturing into many new concepts that reconceptualise these ages.These twenty-first century poems challenge many of the archaic Greek poet's assumptions and ideas, writing back to the ancient world with bravura while employing quintessentially contemporary inflections and preoccupations.

Everything sings in these pages, from birds to buildings who remember the children who once lived there. The work is a soundtrack of ghosts, a world of recovery where the dead sit on deckchairs and the living compare themselves to chalk outlines on the pavement. Powerful, startling, and utterly original these prose poems have a pulse. Hardwick is a master of the form. Angela Readman  Poems in The Lithium Codex shape pages of a book of melancholy; gently fabricated soft prose blocks of longings and losings; lyric attempts – doomed to fail but, as failure, always also positively self-contained – to home in on and perhaps also to shrink from, or simply to understand, the painful distance or chasm agape between self and world, I and other, psyche and language, through beautiful, thoughtful, fragile phenomenological laments. Memoryscapes, mindscapes, drifting, to-ing and fro-ing in private and public time, without a real desire for origo or destination, or even authorship and/or companionship, always torn by tension of phobia and philia, processing the process of being, remembering, writing itself. Ágnes Lehóczky While each poem of The Lithium Codex gives the impression of being improvised, what impresses is how skilfully the effects are realised. It is not just the inventiveness of the writing but its precision. These prose poems have the authority of a classic.  David Mark Williams   

Oz Hardwick’s collection of prose poems Learning to have lost  the passing of time, memory, old age, illness, death and how these resonate and move within and around each other . True to form, Hardwick achieves a sense of a musical refrain and rhythm underpinning and connecting this absorbing collection. While the subject matter is weighty and the pain from the litany of loss candidly expressed, a resolute humour asserts itself throughout that is sometimes sinister, sometimes surreal, often surprising and enormously engaging.