Description
Book SynopsisOli 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.
Trade Review'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
