Blotter (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781784105303)

Oli 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.

Author: Oli Hazzard
ISBN-10: 1784105309
ISBN-13: 9781784105303
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Language: English
Published: 04/15/2018
Pages: 104
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.20w x 0.40d