Independent Publishers Group Logo

Sign up today...
for featured titles, special offers, bestsellers, and more, in your inbox!

Subscribe to receive special offers, monthly books suggestions, seasonal selections, and more!

Close
Blotter
Blotter

Blotter

POETRY

104 Pages, 5.5 x 8.5

Formats: Trade Paper, Mobipocket, EPUB, PDF

Trade Paper, $12.99 (US $12.99) (CA $17.99)

Publication Date: April 2018

ISBN 9781784105303

Rights: US, CA, NZ, CAM, SAM, CAR, PH, KR & FM

Carcanet Press, Ltd. (Apr 2018)
Carcanet Press Ltd.

eBook

eBook Editions Available

Will it work on my eReader?
Price: $12.99
 
 

Overview

From the winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize and the 2013 Eric Gregory Award comes an inventive and experimental new collection which responds in new ways to the language of the internet. The poems in Blotter are preoccupied with the passage of time, and the different ways that passage can be registered and made unstable; 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 responds to all these concerns: it is a police blotter, a diary, a tab of acid, and, in its painterly connotation, a way of rendering the world in a manner that is vague, blurred, and out of focus.

Reviews

"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

"One of the most exciting developments in British poetry in years." —The Boston Review

"Hazzard's gift lies in making the unusual seem aphoristic, turning words on their heads to shock an unsuspecting reader.' —The Economist

"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

"Both funny and touching. It is his flair for phrases that catch one's breath that has stood Oli Hazzard in good stead." —The Literateur

"Reminiscent of early, difficult Auden . . . [Hazzard] belies the notion that today's young poets are working in a cutesy, self-contained bubble." —Dai George, Poetry Wales

Author Biography

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.