Sleepers Awake
Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013
Oli Hazzard's third collection emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology: ambitious, formally various poems and sequences extract "the ore / from boredom", as memory – personal, familial, social, historical – and the collective memory of poetry itself are wrenched out of shape by disruptions in rhythm, space, and scale. The sadness and
pain of forgetting are here too, alongside its unexpected potential:
"remember how you forget's
more interesting
than how you remember
what day, what name,
what song, what what"
The title, borrowed from the Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata, catches the book's dreamy, cross-temporal, kaleidoscopic dialogues. "Sleepers Awake" is satirical, tender and hopeful, allusive and intense, and its poems make spaces for intimacy with the reader, arguing "through an off-key melody / for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure /
of live-drawing in sceptical company".
Oli Hazzard's third collection emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology: ambitious, formally various poems and sequences extract "the ore / from boredom", as memory – personal, familial, social, historical – and the collective memory of poetry itself are wrenched out of shape by disruptions in rhythm, space, and scale. The sadness and
pain of forgetting are here too, alongside its unexpected potential:
"remember how you forget's
more interesting
than how you remember
what day, what name,
what song, what what"
The title, borrowed from the Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata, catches the book's dreamy, cross-temporal, kaleidoscopic dialogues. "Sleepers Awake" is satirical, tender and hopeful, allusive and intense, and its poems make spaces for intimacy with the reader, arguing "through an off-key melody / for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure /
of live-drawing in sceptical company".
About the author
Oli Hazzard was born in Bristol in 1986, and studied English at University College London and the University of Bristol. He is currently researching 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).