"This slim guide might be The Schoolboys' Rebellion because, as the writer laments, the future's not how the bubble-gum cards once described it.
Hardwick's haunting threnodies for the world reek with sorrow at the present age and return you to childhood when a time machine could still be built, and an imagined future was still possible.
In his textual steppingstones to once imagined futures and beleaguered pasts, billionaires vainly "stroke the tail of space" while the writer tries to stem Collapse. Already, meaning has fled and comforts have gone.
But the here and now is what counts, he seems to say, and when our eyes are taken off what really matters then evolution will find its own solution. His implied remedy is to walk a gentle path home into remembering what once was and to build renewal.
As with any Hardwick micro-fictions of recent years these will raise your vision to arrive at an unexpected view of human nature and a new appreciation of possibility."
- Michael Butterworth
"Reading this poetry is like walking in the countryside and coming upon a wood. It looks dense and solid and, in places where the bushes greet you at the tree line, impenetrable. As you step into them you may find nettles and thorns give you a foreboding welcome, but as you get in deeper, they thin out, and you are left with occasional thickets and moss and tree trunks.
Just as the patterns in the bush barriers were dense and intricately and haphazardly woven, the trees in the forest seem to have simpler, larger written, and bolder patterns.
It takes a full step into this poetry to appreciate fully the organic wholeness of its formation and to feel the underlying world it is creating, in which all the apparently separate organisms are made whole under the surface by being rooted in the fungi universe. In these poems the verses are separate aspects of one whole being's perspective - through the thoughts, revelations, impressions, questions and feelings expressed in the words of the poet.
Time dissolves before our very eyes as, with humour, Oz fearlessly dissects hopes, dreams, and delusions - science and nature come together and are unable to undo the human conundrum. Safe to say that if we observe ourselves and our history, and the history of our hopes and fears, at least humour can let us see our predicament and have a touchingly warm, if cynical, glance at ourselves."
- Arthur Brown
Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published "a fair few" full collections and chapbooks, including Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and most recently My Life as a Time Traveller: A Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (Clevedon: Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2023). His manuscript Orion Highway won the 2024 Dolors Alberola International Poetry Prize and will be published by Dalya Press in 2025. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK). Cover image: Welcome to the Futuro by Oz Hardwick
