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Blotter Oli Hazzard

Blotter By Oli Hazzard

Blotter by Oli Hazzard


$11.99
Condition - Very Good
Only 1 left

Summary

From the winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize and the 2013 Eric Gregory Award, a new collection containing pastoral poems of crisis and the internet.

Blotter Summary

Blotter by Oli Hazzard

Oli Hazzard's Blotter consists of five sequences, each constructed using a different process. In `Graig Syfyrddin' notes on hillwalking in the Welsh marches - the poet's former home - alternate with found text taken from an online walking forum. `Blotter' is a shepherd's calendar of sonnets composed of Russian spambot script - a mix of lifestyle advice, gaming tips, authoritarian propaganda, bucolic fragments and apocalyptic messages. `Within Habit' is a series of prose poems collaged from numerous sources. `March and May' comprises parallel columns of verse. `Or As' is a family of 81 seventeen-syllable poems, each one an erasure of the corresponding page in a different book the poet was writing alongside Blotter. The poems are preoccupied, above all, with the passage of time, and how that passage can be differently registered or disturbed: the working day, the distorted seasons, the timestamp of a text message, the jottings of a daybook, the formal structure of a shepherd's calendar, the double exposure of a photograph, the reverse-flow of a Twitter feed. The title, Blotter, connects these concerns, suggesting at once a police blotter, a journal, a thing for drying wet spots, and, in its painterly connotation, a way of rendering the world in a manner that is vague, blurred, or out of focus.

Blotter Reviews

'Hazzard's gift lies in making the unusual seem aphoristic, turning words on their heads to shock an unsuspecting reader.' - The Economist; `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 lover's touch, to hear both a lullaby and the shocking truth.' - Maureen N. McLane

About Oli Hazzard

Oli Hazzard was born in Bristol in 1986, and studied English at University College London and the University of Bristol. He has researched John Ashbery's poetry at the University of Oxford. Oli Hazzard's poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies including The Forward Book of Poetry 2010, Best British Poetry 2011, The Salt Book of Younger Poets and New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011). He now teaches at the University of St Andrews and lives in Edinburgh.

Additional information

GOR009612821
9781784105303
1784105309
Blotter by Oli Hazzard
Used - Very Good
Paperback
Carcanet Press Ltd
20180222
104
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Blotter