Description
Everything sings in these pages, from birds to buildings who remember the children who once lived there. The work is a soundtrack of ghosts, a world of recovery where the dead sit on deckchairs and the living compare themselves to chalk outlines on the pavement. Powerful, startling, and utterly original these prose poems have a pulse. Hardwick is a master of the form. Angela Readman
Poems in The Lithium Codex shape pages of a book of melancholy; gently fabricated soft prose blocks of longings and losings; lyric attempts – doomed to fail but, as failure, always also positively self-contained – to home in on and perhaps also to shrink from, or simply to understand, the painful distance or chasm agape between self and world, I and other, psyche and language, through beautiful, thoughtful, fragile phenomenological laments. Memoryscapes, mindscapes, drifting, to-ing and fro-ing in private and public time, without a real desire for origo or destination, or even authorship and/or companionship, always torn by tension of phobia and philia, processing the process of being, remembering, writing itself. Ágnes Lehóczky
While each poem of The Lithium Codex gives the impression of being improvised, what impresses is how skilfully the effects are realised. It is not just the inventiveness of the writing but its precision. These prose poems have the authority of a classic. David Mark Williams
About Oz Hardwick
Oz Hardwick is a York-based writer, photographer and musician, who has been published extensively worldwide, and has read everywhere from Glastonbury Festival to New York, via countless back rooms of pubs. His prose poetry chapbook ‘Learning to Have Lost’ (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry. His most recent chapbooks are ‘The Lithium Codex’ (Clevedon: The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2019), a collection of “powerful, startling, and utterly original” prose poems (Angela Readman), and ‘Wolf Planet’ (Clevedon: The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020), a ‘staggering offering from a bold artist’ (Eugen Bacon).
A keen collaborator with other artists, Oz has had work performed by classical musicians in UK concert halls, by flamenco musicians in Italian villas, and with experimental sound and film artists in an Australian cinema. The latest publication from this collaborative ethos is ‘Close as Second Skins’ (Beaworthy: Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2015), a tanka sequence written with Amina Alyal, which draws West and East, past and present into crystalline poems that glitter and shine long after the book has been closed. This was shortlisted for the 2015 Saboteur Collaborative Work Award.
Oz has edited and co-edited several collections, of which ‘The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry’ (with Anne Caldwell – Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) is the most recent, and ‘The Valley Press Anthology of Yorkshire Poetry (with Miles Salter – Scarborough: Valley Press, 2017) was a National Poetry Day 2017 recommendation.
His performance photographs have been used on album covers by bands including Hawkwind, Solstice, Magic Mushroom Band, Ozric Tentacles & Haze, as well as in magazines and books. He has also exhibited in galleries and had his photographs in a number of academic books and journals.
Oz has played in a number of bands – mainly bass, but also other stringed instruments. Recordings with Sixpenny Wayke & A Tiding of Magpies are featured on compilations ‘Hail be You Sovereigns, Lief and Dear’ and ‘The Forme To The Fynisment Foldes Ful Selden’ (Cold Spring, 2013 & 2020). He is also a regular contributor to the music magazine RnR.
By day, Oz is Professor of English and Programme Leader for English and Writing at Leeds Trinity University. In an academic capacity, he has published the monograph, ‘English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning’ (Boydell, 2011), edited a number of books on the Middle Ages and myth, and written many articles on the Middle Ages and medievalism, along with Creative Writing as an academic discipline.
His one regret in life is that he is not Belgian.
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