Oz Hardwick

"This slim guide might be The Schoolboys' Rebellion because, as the writer laments, the future's not how the bubble-gum cards once described it.Hardwick's haunting threnodies for the world reek with sorrow at the present age and return you to childhood when a time machine could still be built, and an imagined future was still possible.In his textual steppingstones to once imagined futures and beleaguered pasts, billionaires vainly "stroke the tail of space" while the writer tries to stem Collapse. Already, meaning has fled and comforts have gone.But the here and now is what counts, he seems to say, and when our eyes are taken off what really matters then evolution will find its own solution. His implied remedy is to walk a gentle path home into remembering what once was and to build renewal.As with any Hardwick micro-fictions of recent years these will raise your vision to arrive at an unexpected view of human nature and a new appreciation of possibility."- Michael Butterworth"Reading this poetry is like walking in the countryside and coming upon a wood. It looks dense and solid and, in places where the bushes greet you at the tree line, impenetrable. As you step into them you may find nettles and thorns give you a foreboding welcome, but as you get in deeper, they thin out, and you are left with occasional thickets and moss and tree trunks.Just as the patterns in the bush barriers were dense and intricately and haphazardly woven, the trees in the forest seem to have simpler, larger written, and bolder patterns.It takes a full step into this poetry to appreciate fully the organic wholeness of its formation and to feel the underlying world it is creating, in which all the apparently separate organisms are made whole under the surface by being rooted in the fungi universe. In these poems the verses are separate aspects of one whole being's perspective - through the thoughts, revelations, impressions, questions and feelings expressed in the words of the poet.Time dissolves before our very eyes as, with humour, Oz fearlessly dissects hopes, dreams, and delusions - science and nature come together and are unable to undo the human conundrum. Safe to say that if we observe ourselves and our history, and the history of our hopes and fears, at least humour can let us see our predicament and have a touchingly warm, if cynical, glance at ourselves."- Arthur Brown

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.

2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. These 21 prose poems were written in a three-way conversation with Dante, who brought his experience of Purgatory to bear as he led us through this era in which we, too, find ourselves trudging an upward spiral with only hope to sustain us. As in his celebrated journey, we encountered trials and obstacles to overcome and lessons to learn, and his guidance was invaluable. We hoped that he would show us Paradise but, like his Roman predecessor, he could only take us so far, leaving us with Virgil's valediction: You have seen the temporary fire and the eternal fire; you have reached the place past which my powers cannot see. The next step is ours to choose."The pandemic is our purgatory in these prose poems, strewn with the detritus of death and life, torment and beauty. Is there a way forward? As we learn from Dante at the very heart of his poem, the next step is ours to choose."- Laurie Shepard, Associate Professor of Italian, Boston College"Amina Alyal and Oz Hardwick bring Dante's themes and images brilliantly to bear on our Covid era, in prose poems whose imaginative flights are superbly controlled - and philosophically purposed. Essential reading in this Dante 700th anniversary year."- Paul Munden, poet and Editor of Divining Dante"A thick soup of allegories that become possible oxymorons in that non-linear sea that is our experience in this life. Amina Alyal and Oz Hardwick have managed to rework Dante's poetic material, with its immense specific weight, and to translate it into a very personal style: rich, vivid and figurative. Despite the thread of a bobbin run by the devil, despite the thin finger that urges us into the labyrinth, and despite the roads blocked by fallen stars and fallen angels, there is a very strong need to dress our bodies with a True - albeit not real - skin that shows us the way."- Santy Masciar , Dante Society London

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.

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.