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Articles by Oz Hardwick
The New Humans - 3:AM Magazine
By Oz Hardwick. Day after day, submarines grow rudimentary limbs and waddle along the shore. They taught us about evolution at school, but back then it was something that took a long time and most things knew their place, yet already the submarines are experimenting with their new limbs, dancing, putting together five-a-side squads for friendly kickabouts, and kneeling at scrimshaw shrines to the USS Tang and the Proteus.
Poem Of The Week: The Displaced Persons Camp By Philip Gross
arts The Displaced Persons Camp Lean vigilant faces, sleepless eyes look up. They sit like children grown unnaturally, cramped into desks in rows, and submit to the language of strangers, a stern new ordering of tenses: is, was, will be. ‘Repeat now, after me.’ Each voice lifts towards clarity, and breaks: waves on a north shore, a dull bafflement of loss. ‘The subtler points - should, might have been - will come in time.’ The class dismissed, they are free to sit, or pace the bare perimeter.
Poem Of The Week: Simplex Munditiis By Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
arts Simplex Munditiis STILL to be neat, still to be drest, As you were going to a feast; Still to be powder'd, still perfumed: Lady, it is to be presumed, Though art's hid causes are not found, All is not sweet, all is not sound. Give me a look, give me a face That makes simplicity a grace; Robes loosely flowing, hair as free: Such sweet neglect more taketh me Than all th' adulteries of art; They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.
Poem Of The Week: Sneak By Geraldine Mitchell
Yorkshire Times A Voice of the Free Press frontpagebusinessartscarslifestylefamilytravelsportsscitechnaturefictionwhatson No cookies. No tracking. No advertising.
Spider Season: I Wanted To Be Close To You By Katie Oliver
arts It is easy to be misled by the titles of Katie Oliver’s short stories: archly simple, the received effect is diversionary, inclined to blindside the reader towards satisfying conventional expectations. And up to a point they do, like bottles of HP Sauce, describe their contents. But Oliver’s universe is surreal, fetid, and teeming with organic purpose, as though to reify the intrinsic meaning of the title tenfold, to make an irony of its apparent directness.
Prose Poem Of The Week: At The City Gates By Oz Hardwick
arts At the City Gates When the city gates open, dreams flood out, like dockers on bicycles when the four o’clock siren sings freedom, oiled chains whirring like bees. It’s been an age since anything worked, but there are grooves worn in blistered tarmac that you can see if you kick away the residue from the last high tide, and when you drop the needle the whole world spins like a charity shop album, playing a song everyone danced to when you were a teenager, though not by the original artist.
Poem Of The Week: Deathbed Observation By Kit Wright
Yorkshire Times Weekend Edition frontpagebusinessartscarslifestylefamilytravelsportsscitechnaturefictionwhatson No cookies. No tracking. No advertising. Steve Whitaker Literary Editor @stevewh16944270 arts Deathbed Observation Broken in my father’s face, The lock of anguish and dismay, And lines of laughter – burned away In death that turned his body grey. Fell no dark upon that place. Death relit a younger grace. Strange, in his own light, he lay And he was handsome as the day.
Poem Of The Week: The Way Through the Woods By Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
arts The Way Through the Woods They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees. It is underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones. Only the keeper sees That, where the ring-dove broods, And the badgers roll at ease, There was once a road through the woods.
Poem Of The Week: They Shut Me Up In Prose By Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Yorkshire Times Weekend Edition frontpagebusinessartscarslifestylefamilytravelsportsscitechnaturefictionwhatson No cookies. No tracking. No advertising.
Poem Of The Week: 'My Heart's In The Highlands' By Robert Burns
arts My Heart’s in the Highlands My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer; Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe, My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North, The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth ; Wherever I wander, wherever I rove, The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
Between The Acts: The Still And Fleeting Fire By Amina Alyal & Oz Hardwick
arts Amina Alyal and Oz Hardwick bestride the earthly universe like prophets in their prose-poem collaboration for Hedgehog Poetry Press. That one of the subjects of their philosophical exploration is the pandemic need not be undermined by the tardiness of this review, because there is a wider serviceability to their poetic mandate: the pandemic, here, is one symptom only of a greater malaise, as the authors’ katabatic descent indicates.
Returning To Didcot: A Commonplace By Jonathan Davidson
Jonathan Davidson knows when to stop talking. And if we are to measure beauty solely by the standard of brevity we are on to a winner with his new book, at a consumptive 106 pages. Davidson stops talking when he doesn’t perceive a need to continue, and instead fills the spaces where superfluity might otherwise rein, with synoptic treasures. And then he moves on.
Poem Of The Week: From Under Milk Wood By Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Steve Whitaker Literary Editor 12:22 PM 28th October 2020 from Under Milk Wood To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
The Safety of Clouds: Fledge By Jonathan Humble
If you studied English Literature at school in the late sixties or early seventies, and you were searching for a way through the woods, it’s very likely that you encountered the figure of Ted Hughes on your journey. The brooding, visceral presence in your mind’s eye, the hand that drove the instructive pen in Poetry in the Making, and the shockingly original natural images of Hawk in the Rain, may even have given you an impetus to write.
Ghost Flowers: The Poetry Of Emma Simon, Nick On & Hilary Menos
Even in a series of collections as disparate, and individually rewarding, as the three winners of the Poetry Business competition for 2019, there is a tendency to try to locate connections, as though it were incumbent upon the reviewer to think thematic or lyrical simpatico into being. It’s where a natural synoptic impulse, or an urge for clarity through the illusion of verisimilitude, leads us.
Poem Of The Week: 'Incoming' By Jonathan Humble
Curlews. Photo by Burkhard Lüling Incoming. A missile, maybe; an approaching Exocet, or a Super Étendard flashing wildly out of the sun over San Carlos water. There is an observational precision to Jonathan Humble’s neatly-drawn series of couplets which mimics cold military science; the poetics of the contingent and the concrete, the expedience and the murderous nemesis. But Humble’s tone is counter-intuitive - it belies a sense of awe, and of real love of subject.
Preparing For The Worst: Funerals Your Way By Sarah Jones
Steve Whitaker Literary Editor 7:22 PM 16th December 2018 You could barely call Leeds funeral director, and former surgeon, Sarah Jones’ new guide timely; this subject matter is never timely: the prospect of death is something we tend to shield ourselves from, if not to actively shelve, until it affects us directly.
Sweating Cubism Out:
‘The biographer quite deranged Neurasthenic and excitable Flowers unguents Pins and a big brown moon’ ‘the softer packets fascinated Braque he sensed a new kind of space in which the fans and instruments could be made to ‘synthesize’’ ‘had a short walk to get to one of the cars usually rinsed off in the bathtub with some nice glass suddenly the window seems washed though maybe it’s still modern what can it do to anyone you’d be surprised put in the food and water the cars and so on he’s a...
Sweating Cubism Out:
‘The biographer quite deranged Neurasthenic and excitable Flowers unguents Pins and a big brown moon’ ‘had a short walk to get to one of the cars usually rinsed off in the bathtub with some nice glass suddenly the window seems washed though maybe it’s still modern what can it do to anyone you’d be surprised put in the food and water the cars and so on he’s a nice man until the wet congeals’ (‘Untitled’) ‘the narrator encounters a madeleine literature is ancillary to cognition essence effs the...
That Summer Feeling By Mark Hodkinson
Rendering a description of a new novel as ‘man fiction’ may signal a useful marketing strategy, but it surely circumscribes authorial intention in a way that is helpful to neither writer nor general reader.
Clinging To The Wreckage:
‘Someone asked what hegira meant. He loved being asked the meaning of words or to explain a phrase he’d used.
Poem Of The Week
Filmclip: Leningrad, October 1935 Dark comes early, and wet snow. The citizens hurry from work, scarfed, buttoned, thinking of supper, the tram clanking and squealing in whose glass an arm has wiped a V of lit space wherein smoke, old and young wrapped for winter, eyes focussed somewhere ahead, dreaming perhaps of a sausage, of bread, coffee, a warm bed, a bullet in the back of the brain. Then they’re gone. Next comes The future. It looks like the past.
DIY For The Unconvinced:
This luxuriant chapbook of prose poems, commissioned by the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), is Oz Hardwick’s latest addition to a fine body of work.
DIY For The Unconvinced:
This luxuriant chapbook of prose poems, commissioned by the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), is Oz Hardwick’s latest addition to a fine body of work.
A More Than Common Goal:
Settle publisher Naked Eye’s Potted Thesis series is an intelligent and innovative new venture. Taking the sting out of the aridity of much research – theses are typically 95,000 words plus in length – well-planned abridgements will, it is hoped, grab the attention of the general reader in toothsome morsels, whilst maintaining the integrity of breaking new academic ground.Best of all, publication gives the hapless writer/researcher the opportunity to reach a wider audience.
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