In his new collection Sleepers Awake, Oli Hazzard speaks in the gentle voice of a father, academic, and mid-career poet. More interested in evoking the texture of everyday life, like “the shadow a maple / made in April,” than in asking big questions or mounting big arguments, Sleepers Awake displays no grand emotions. Hazzard’s dailiness, his focus on sensory experience, and his more nonsensical verses (see “Dingdingdinggedicht,” which begins, “Yes to panic; / Cool projective pragmatism, one hundo”) may lead us to think of Sleepers Awake as that “poetry without any ideas in it // brimming with a real stupidity” referenced in the collection’s first poem, “Progress: Real and Imagined.” But in his inclusions and exclusions—in these reports from a life of the mind, body, and spirit—Hazzard does make claims about what might be worthy of attention. Indeed, he tells us what he finds beautiful, as when he writes: “last leaf bits / capsize in // eczemary air . . .
nothing is so beautiful
as when you say
ok, reluctantly
you can tell me
your funded dream
about daylight
§
In these lines from “Progress,” note the limited punctuation and lowercase letters, the speaker’s use of “ok” rather than “okay,” and that adverb “reluctantly.” Hazzard exhibits a lightness of touch, and a reluctance to maintain formality, impose “any ideas,” or declare clear intentions: “. . . accidents and poetry,” he writes later, “descend directly from the sky.” We might read the “§” after “daylight” as a sign of humility, too––a symbol used in legal documents seems to work just fine to signify a break––or, given its use in professional contexts, it might remind us that Hazzard is, in many ways, a pro. A Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, he has, since 2012, published two previous poetry collections, a monograph on John Ashbery, and a novel in the form of one long sentence.
That “funded dream // about daylight,” a glimpse of illumination behind closed lids, brings to mind the £57,300 Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship that Hazzard received in 2022, giving him “a period of free time to work on this book,” as he told the University of St Andrews Press Office. This is a privileged place from which to write poetry, certainly, and not the place from which most poets write, but aspects of the collection seem to reflect these material conditions. “Progress” spans 55 of the book’s 123 pages. At its center is a long prose poem that touches on the historical practice of patronage, and the way a poet might honor their benefactor in verse, in exchange for commission. The refrain “Days pass . . . ,” and the lines “(A few weeks to decide / how to break this line.)” evoke an image of the speaker clocking in and clocking out––composing the work, or avoiding work, over several creative sessions. The reference to “remain[ing] / bitterly out of normal work” in “Love Hack” may also be self-referential.
A perky and quirky vitality animates some moments of “Progress,” as well as other poems in Sleepers Awake, but so too does “a music of stylised ennui,” as the critic Richie McCaffery notes in his review of the collection. Consider, in “Progress,” the speaker’s description of an “I can barely put / the dishes away // kind of aesthetic,” his “performance / of exhaustion,” or the question, “if you’re happy / and you know it // is it worth it.” In this poem, the space between leisure and labor that art-making occupies is not necessarily one of carefree pleasure. “What to paste next / in this dumpy poem,” the speaker asks, and indeed “Progress,” like daily life itself, slips here and there into the dumpy, the boring, and the nonsensical––but only as often as it slips into splashes of gorgeous clarity, as when he strips down his palette to primary colors, fuses the technological and natural, and, as if unclenching a fist, releases any claim to utility, in just four lines: “Blue light / Green leaf / A whole useless / Sensory life.”
Hazzard has a good ear for the potency of individual words. He stays sensitive to the sound, sense, and visual interest of language. (For instance, when he adds the line “{Zealand}” to “Dingdingdinggedicht,” between the phrase “mammal glow” and the affirmation “Yeah––yes. Feels good,” does he not like the look of those two curly brackets?) This attention to detail shines brighter in the collection’s eighteen shorter poems––ranging from one to nine pages––than either in “Progress” or the last poem, “Incunabulum.” So too does this sensitivity shine brighter in shorter lines. “Incunabulum” runs for sixteen pages and features lines so long they run parallel to the book’s spine. “Incunabulum” may leave readers exhausted, waiting for a break, though this reflects no universal truth about line length. The acknowledgments of Sleepers Awake lists the poet Ben Lerner, who has excelled at long lines since he spun out the sonnets of his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures (2004).
Yet Lerner and Hazzard have more similarities than differences. Both jump between genres, admire John Ashbery, and write about technology and fatherhood. Hazzard’s “Blue light / Green leaf” takes on a socio-political edge for Lerner in “Dilation,” when he writes, “I came into the cities at a time in which all but the poorest among us had been colonized by blue light.” Or, regarding child-rearing, the speaker of “Progress,” whose children enjoy Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol, writes, “I was writing this in bed / the children thrown to sleep // and thought I heard rain.” Lerner includes daughters who ask if his speaker has “met / Amanda Gorman” in “The Readers,” and in “The Media,” he seems more sentimental than Hazzard, yearning to put words to his fatherly affection: “The way we say of our children ‘they went down’ to mean they fell asleep, that makes me glass, soft glass bending in long meadows…”
Another similarity: Lerner and Hazzard each seem, at times, to write distinctly American and British poetry, respectively. Hazzard, who was born in Bristol, makes the occasional reference to Great Britain, as in the phrases “I fancied ‘Britishness’” and “Yoker sky fragments.” Yet much of Sleepers Awake takes place in mental landscapes. Consider the book’s title: at the edge of sleeping and waking, we are not on firm ground, spatially or temporally. “I situate myself emotionally,” Hazzard writes, in “the late nineteenth century.” I think of Hazzard’s 2017 obituary for Ashbery, which ends not with an Ashbery quote, but with a paragraph from an 1870 essay by Walter Pater. “It seems to me entirely apt that the most accurate description” of Ashbery’s poetry, Hazzard explained, “was written decades before he was born.” Likewise, the best description I can find for Sleepers Awake comes, not from Hazzard or Pater, but from “Relief Work,” David Russell’s essay on Pater’s tact: “Transitional states: waking and sleeping, creation and death, dawn and twilight, keep alive an enchanting sense of the next worlds always contiguous with ours––that we may seek their horizons.” Hazzard helps us find the way.
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