Carcanet Press - Between Two Windows

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 '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 '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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Between Two Windows Oli Hazzard 10% off eBook (EPUB) 10% off Paperback 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 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Sep 2012) 9781847776808 £9.95 £8.96 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. 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 '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 '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 You might also be interested in: Emporium Ian Pindar New Poetries V Edited by Michael Schmidt with Eleanor Crawforth Misprint James Womack	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! 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