Exercises in Iconography
by Oz Hardwick
Storm sky over Black Mountain. Sheep shivering in the lee of a grey lean-to. A track that’s more allegory than passage. We have driven so far that we’ve arrived in a Victorian print, separated from the spine of its forgotten novel and placed in a cheap frame in a run-down B&B. We have reached the point at which the car has become a rickety cart, dragged by an unwilling donkey who dreams of a life at the seaside, and we have entered the zone in which we have lived almost twice our predicted lifespan. It goes without saying that this is not what we expected when we loaded up the boot with our most treasured possessions and ushered the kids into the back seat, though perhaps the fact that we had never seen these milk-eyed children in their shoddy togs before should have alerted us to something going awry. The sky is full of wings and pointing fingers. The mountain speaks.
Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, barely-competent bass guitarist, and accidental academic, who has been described as a “major proponent of the neo-surreal prose poem in Britain”. His most recent full collection, A Census of Preconceptions (SurVision Books, 2022), was shortlisted for a number of international awards but didn’t win any, though he feels pretty confident about the upcoming over-60s egg-and-spoon race. His latest publications are the chapbook Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024) and a track on the Deadworld album by British space rockers Incubus Lovechild. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.