Between Two Windows

Reviews / Votes

'Haunting, hilarious, exquisitely inventive, Between Two Windows is a brilliant first collection by one of the brightest young stars in the poetic firmament.'

Mark Ford '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 'Between Two Windows by Oli Hazzard is impressive in its formal assuredness and confidence of tone, all the while questioning what poetry is and does.'

Adam Newey, The Guardian A clear, bright voice that can turn to dazzling obfuscation and darkness in this debut collection from a young poet.Personal, genuine and rigorously thought through, for all its dreamlike detail. Early on in Between Two Windows, Oli Hazzard's debut collection of poems, a description of a journey through a frosty landscape leads to the layered image of 'your car, / the image of you / in the image of your car, squinting / out through the wind shield for the road's / slick shields of black ice'. 'Kayak', the collection's final poem, ends with a similar vision of a figure staring into a lake, attempting to look beyond himself. As both poems suggest, reflections in the broadest sense are ubiquitous in Hazzard's writing. Wavering between a conversational tone and occasionally florid diction, this is poetry that wanders through language's lonely hall of mirrors, making a show of questions its own observations. Here are speakers who wonder if the windows in which they see their outlines are rooms in themselves, who find the sound of water 'falls too quickly' and who - somewhat bizarrely - greet the morning as 'colours laid on top of one another'. The narrator of 'Sonnet' notes how 'I count myself, count myself again'.

With a handful of his British compatriots and many an American contemporary Hazzard's presiding influence is John Ashbery. Ashbery appears in the poems syntactic jump-cuts, sometimes abstract imagery, and vague but persistent sense of unease. 'Some Shadows', an atmospheric lament on the shortcomings of language and one of the book's most striking pieces, surely owes some of its success to Hazzard's study of Ashbery's sestinas. The latter also fuels numerous formal experiments in which Hazzard embraces Oulipian word games - sometimes brilliantly. While a poem that consists entirely of palindromic lines or a list of definitions of obscure words will never make for more than a minor curiousity, 'Pantoum in Which Wallace Stevens Gives Me Vertigo' achieves a surprisingly witty homage to an American master, as well as to the peculiar pleasures of poetry in general. This playful streak, also apparent in the moral imperatives of 'A Few Precepts' (Keep your mind / on a short leash'; 'If you pick at that threat / you'll be caught with your pants down'), offers a welcome reprieve from the tendency to overblown description and windy philosophizing found elsewhere. By the same token, the book's second half contains a few vignettes that shine with lapidary, clear-cut phrasing, proving that less is more.