Oli Hazzard. Sleepers Awake. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025. 144 pages.

 



Sleepers Awake marks Oli Hazzard’s third collection of poems in twelve years. His pace betrays no tendency, neither extravagance nor thrift. This is probably the ideal speed for keeping one’s nose, if not feet, in the game and for going only occasionally noticed, on this side of the Atlantic, at least. His name, apart from being utterly punnable—one hopes for a future volume called Hazzard Pay, or perhaps a trade manual, Occupational Hazzards—is not yet synonymous with anything. This, his first book to be published by a US firm, a year after its UK release by Carcanet, consists mostly of two poems: "Progress, Real and Imagined,” an epic by any other name at sixty pages, and "Incunabulum” which ends the book on sixteen sections of long quatrains. The other poems—there are twenty in total—range from one to nine pages in length. That the book makes a coherent whole is thanks to Hazzard’s consistency of tone and attack; these are notional, diaristic poems. Their speaker, with his wandering mind and microscopic interest in the details of everyday life, is a Tom Thumb, an everyman, slacker-dad and supernumerary, looking out from some unstable niche on his—our—impromptu twenty-first century existence.

Bored and beleaguered, he attends to his tedious work: “extracting the ore / from boredom . . . doodling / in the centre of [his] life.” There’s an abiding sense of whateverness and moments of hypnogogic plod:

I write myself to sleep . . .

It’s like there was no information

to be had . . .

Days pass . . .

In this long first poem, as throughout the collection, Hazzard takes in “Thursday’s / daily buffering / of quondam form . . . blue light/ green leaf / a whole useless / sensory life.”  Some pages later, we get:

a skillion roof . . .

to summon snow with,

to bring

into being

the field

of statistics.

The children wave

to the bears

in the window

with real sticks.

I visualize a sinkhole

in the shape of a swastika.

. . .

Something comes out in the language.

There’s something here.

I don’t know.

Here are some of Hazzard’s hallmarks: his diction, at once homespun and gourmet (skillion roof is news to me), his fixation with windows, mirrors, and other wet surfaces, his interest in children, in snow, and in all the fuzziness and false starts of contemporary living. Far from being readable in any useful or conventional sense, these poems demonstrate one of those “fascinating ways with language” so highly prized by Gottfried Benn. But, like any responsible poet, Hazzard also takes an interest in the language of others; even “technical language” has its own “pickpocketable beauty” (from a poem unaccountably titled “The Opera Buffa Buff, Biff, Sounded Dead”).

Writing in this mode and in our century proves a dirty and sometimes self-defeating job, but Hazzard moves through his book’s 127 pages with linguistic gusto. He draws on the latencies of English, taking energy from our language’s “thorny wattage”; odd Anglo-Saxon accents and ersatz compound nouns cast a pall of antiquity over descriptions of contemporary urban life, as in the title poem:

It’s those

Skinny tree

Shadows again

Webbing the park rink

Whitecold day, slyly

That run of modifiers—“Skinny, webbing, whitecold, slyly”—leaves the reader in a thicket of description and lands Hazzard in the company of such ace describers as W.S. Graham and Samuel Beckett, for whom the adjective or adjectival phrase becomes a motor, not a brake pedal or a speed bump. One thinks of Beckett's “Lessness”—“Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind”—or Graham’s “Malcolm Mooney’s Land”: “Oh benign creature with the small ear-hole, / Submerger under silence, lead / Me where the unblubbered monster goes.” While Hazzard’s poems sometimes smack of their midcentury influences, they never reek of them. He is utterly of the moment, and often to a fault, occasionally lapsing into a kind of digitalese that reads at once overcooked and unfinished: “The yelp app / yelps deep down / in the Alps” (“Living, etc.”). This is cloying, artificially enhanced language; the pun on “Yelp” is an exercise in bathos. It’s a cheap flourish, and one that undersells Hazzard’s talents.

A major virtue of this collection is its ability to turn and turn constantly from interest to interest, and, therefore, from weakness to strength. One takes an unembarrassed pleasure in certain turns of phrase. I find myself utterly charmed by the opening of “Composed at Erdberg”:

Going forwards

into zinc motes

              buggily humming

              a maything song

These lines have a colloquial freshness, as Hazzard makes way for new and askew words like “buggily” and “maything.” But this spurt of invention—which reminds me of the “wakespeak” Seamus Heaney employed in his translation of Beowulf—is quashed, cannily, I think, by the next set of lines: 

I almost lurch

            to punch my own 

            voice, crushingly
            loud in airpods

                     cancelling the moor

            of shuffled spruce,

            rushes, and larch.

Abetted by tech, the human voice intrudes on, even erases, nature; note the blistering fricative/sibilant compounds in “shuffled spruce” and “rushes.” This poem, my favorite in the collection, shows Hazzard’s knack for balancing both language and sentiment, as in this moment of disquiet near the poem’s close:

Jay called again

about the cosmetics.

Despite his

Sweetness,

He leaves

           a feeling

           in you.                  

Elsewhere, Hazzard vacillates between the erect and the erratic; there's sometimes a breeziness and immediacy to the language:

request

that we be

sequins

            glinting privately

in the raiments

            of May                 

            (“Progress: Real and Imagined”)

but also many spondees and hard stops: “Crab lab hack, meet familiar world man / triggering objects, advertising a moon” (“Incunabulum”). Hazzard also eschews the concentration one usually demands from lyric poetry and instead holds his observations to a scattershot scrutiny; things don’t suffer prolonged analysis but hover into and around the field of the speaker’s interest in a poem called ”Love Hack”:

              Corn flake

plankton swirl

broke piano

slick duck

sound the real thing

gong. Perma-March

merch outside

            wet blossoms

Here, Hazzard attempts, in his cramped, haikuish way, to render sensory experience in concrete particulars. But most poets do this, and some more successfully; “sound the real thing / gong” sounds nothing like spoken English. The real innovation, then, is in the delivery system: long poems consisting of short lines whose visual effect is that of either vertebrae or sinew stretching down the lefthand margin. In both cases, one imagines Hazzard raveling and unravelling individual strands of poetry DNA, encoding both language and the self from which it issues onto the page. These lines come solo, as above, or else in tandem columns. Again, from the opener:

            O K

             I have needed a glass of water

                                       For a long time

excited by                       long-term fatigue and its strong performance

access to daylight           was a big part of the work.

in theory                                 For a long time

Fantasy workplace:

“Think.”

Does not occur

Not all innovations are created equal. Reading this collection there were times, as above, I thought my galley had exploded; these prolapsed lines hardly function at the level of grammar, let alone meaning. There's something here about strain and duration and the efforts of art—performance, fatigue, the need for a breather—but this reader finds little purchase.

Yet, after a sufficient period of inoculation (or indoctrination, depending) one grows immune to his scruples. The random and at times erratic lineation means there is little apparatus to these poems—no fourth wall, no caginess, no attempt to keep the reader at bay or at a comfortable distance. Hazzard communicates very directly, if in an abstract and tortured way. His language consists mostly of clauses, not sentences but shoots and spools of syntax, nonce thoughts and wistful, probing observations, sometimes cancelled or undermined. The first poem, for instance, brings:

News of

knives

and forks

neuter of counterfactus

I remember the shadow

of the bank headquarters

as an enormous

see-though parfait.

5pm “unfolding”

a moot song

Though thrawn and sometimes wordy (“neuter of counterfactus”?), these poems rarely overstate themselves. They prefer casual to causal relationships; “Living, etc.,” demonstrates Hazzard’s irreverence toward figurative language: “these mysterious objects, residual tech / shining among the myrtle leaves // noun noun / noun noun.” So instead of symbols what we get, in spades, is insight, but insight refracted and sharpened in such a way that it spears the reader, as on the first page of “Postpositivity in Spring”:

            It’s nice

to imagine you

sitting down

to write me

and putting it off.

Not to owe

is good but

to owe and be let

off is better.

Is that true,

sweetie? Or shall

I just

talk over myself
like rain

over

night

The notion that relationships have some responsibility to the truth is compelling but nonetheless approaches the kind of ordinary wisdom that Hazzard usually abjures. He compensates with that strange, squall-like image of “overnight rain,” which carries the speaker outside himself, returning him to the green world of words where possibility triumphs over responsibility.

There are many bad things here—lines too phonetically dense to sound like unforced English, and overlong passages of wandering selfserious prose—but Hazzard’s rarely sloppy. He’s at his best when he deals in particulars, as in this run from “Wanting Another”:

the gulf

moon rises

its flag

over the bay

A car alarm

goes off

and on

bufferingly

These lines yield the ordinary imagistic pleasures until “bufferingly,” that flaccid adverb, has its way with the reader. The word’s a neologism, I think, and I read in it a technological version of the pathetic fallacy—where things get human qualities, or, as here, sounds get the visual qualities we associate with tech (buffering is what screens do)—mixed up with the Joycean impulse to rebuild the world with words. It's a nice touch, one that captures what Robert Frost called “the abstract vitality of our speech.” And if one sometimes gets the sense Hazzard prefers the abstract to the vital, this poem shows he’s capable of both.