Sleepers Awake

Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013Oli Hazzard's third collection emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology: ambitious, formally various poems and sequences extract "the ore / from boredom", as memory – personal, familial, social, historical – and the collective memory of poetry itself are wrenched out of shape by disruptions in rhythm, space, and scale. The sadness andpain of forgetting are here too, alongside its unexpected potential:"remember how you forget'smore interestingthan how you rememberwhat day, what name,what song, what what"The title, borrowed from the Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata, catches the book's dreamy, cross-temporal, kaleidoscopic dialogues. "Sleepers Awake" is satirical, tender and hopeful, allusive and intense, and its poems make spaces for intimacy with the reader, arguing "through an off-key melody / for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure /of live-drawing in sceptical company".