Early on in Between Two Windows , Oli Hazzard's debut collection of poems, a description of a journey through a frosty landscape leads to the layered image of "your car, / the image of you / in the image of your car, squinting / out through the windshield for the road's / slick shields of black ice". "Kayak", the collection's final poem, ends with a similar vision of a figure staring into a lake, attempting to look beyond himself. As both poems suggest, reflections in the broadest sense are ubiquitous in Hazzard's writing. Wavering between a conversational tone and an occasionally florid diction, this is poetry that wanders through language's lonely hall of mirrors, making a show of questioning its own observations. Here are speakers who wonder if the windows in which they see their outlines are rooms in themselves, who find the sound of water falls "too quickly", and who - somewhat bizarrely - greet the morning as "colours laid
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