Leeds Trinity University’s creative writing programme leader Professor Paul ‘Oz’ Hardwick has published a new poetry collection, The Ringmaster’s Apprentice.
Anything but, this is now Oz’s fifth poetry book, and is inspired by spaces between the familiar and domestic, the extraordinary and exotic. Not being 100 per cent sure or in control. Oh yeah.
The collection has already been met with much praise and was chosen as Book of the Month by The Poetry Kit.
The collection will be officially launched at York’s City Screen on Tuesday 11 November at 8pm. Tickets are £4 and will feature performances from the author, Daniela Nunnari, Sankakei and Root 64. You can book your place on the City Screen website.
Oz will also be delivering a lunchtime reading at Leeds Trinity University, at 1pm in room AG21 on Wednesday 12 November, with support from poet and visiting lecturer, Miles Salter.
Here’s a taste.
Cornucopia
Midday. Cats stretch beneath benches,
striped by sharp-edged shadows. Sleep.
As grass gasps between worn stones,
the empty church, laced with ribbons,
plucks bleached sky into colour.
Listen. Out from the song of the sighing sea,
rings on her fingers, rings in her ears,
the surf-crowned, gull-eyed, jewelled muse
with servants bearing fruit and flowers,
whispers her song to empty streets.
Proud and benign, she leads her band
of silent brass and strings, twisting
between shuttered shops and boarded cafes,
stirring no dust, bestowing quiet
blessings on bright whitewashed thresholds.
Come, she whispers, come and enter,
tread the maze that knows no end.
And I can only follow, smiling
through pathways, where murmured words
seep through walls, soothing and promising.
Somewhere off ahead, around this corner,
or maybe the next, a young girl sits,
absorbed, intent, reading glass poems
beneath unnecessary chandeliers, silently
mouthing words by her own light.