York poet Oz Hardwick’s new anthology is full of ‘in between’ places. STEPHEN LEWIS reports.

YORK sewage works have perhaps never featured in a poem before. Oz Hardwick, determined to go where no one has so far dared to tread, puts that omission right in the opening poem of his new collection, The Ringmaster's Apprentice.

The poem is called A Train And A Fox: and it begins with an admission.

"This is not Adlestrop – you'd be hard pressed/

"to romanticise this unscheduled stop by York/ Sewage Treatment Works," Oz writes.

"The scent of grubby grass/

"is overpowered by a chemical stench/ worse than the stink it masks."

It quickly becomes obvious that the poet is sitting in a railway carriage, which has paused just outside York – one of those 'in between' places that are so rich in possibility.

Looking out of the window, he glimpses a fox – just an ordinary, shabby, urban fox, going about his business. For a brief second, the eyes of fox and poet meet. And out of that meeting Oz conjures an image of quite extraordinary beauty.

"As a living, breathing fox, he will not consider/

"narrative, metaphor, or abstract symbol," the poet writes. "Yet/

"before resuming his animal business, our eyes meet/

"and, between a bland train and an unconcerned fox,/

"hangs more poetry than I will ever write."

It is a shining moment that hangs suspended in time – a simple image that contains within it a world of contemplation about our place in the world.

Oz, admits he loves such moments.

In his younger days, when he used to work on the Vauxhall production line in Luton, the 54-year-old Professor of English (he works at Leeds Trinity University but lives in Holgate) admits he and friends used to drive out to a motorway service station just to enjoy being there.

"I've always liked places that people go through, that feeling of not belonging," he says.

A photographer and musician as well as English professor, he spends a lot of time on the move. It's natural enough, therefore, that the Ringmaster's Apprentice should be full of 'in between' moments captured on his travels.

Interruption At The Bus Depot is an unsettlingly simple yet sinister poem in which someone (we don't know who) is stopped and taken aside at a bus station (we don't know why, or who by). Immigration, meanwhile, describes standing in a queue at an airport in the US, waiting – a little tensely and uncertainly – for your visa to be processed and approved.

"In the airport, strangers are wearing masks," he writes.

"Security scans scared eyes, prints fingers,/

"asks awkward questions. Barefoot queues/

"do not move. Time passes. It seems/

"nobody in America speaks English..."

There are darker overtones to The Ringmaster's Apprentice, too, beyond this recurring theme of in-betweenness.

That may be a result of the stage of life which he has reached, Oz admits. Certainly, there is a sense among many of the poems of a man taking stock, someone puzzling over where he is in life and how he got there.

In Arches, he recalls people he knew as a boy growing up in Plymouth. One of them was a lad of about his own age he knew at school. Later, this boy made the newspapers after being caught using the leaves of hallucinogenic plants in the local botanical gardens to get high. Later still, Oz learned that he had died at the age of 25.

Arches describes a brief encounter with him under some railway arches long ago, on a return to Plymouth – his former schoolmate's life clearly having gone off the tracks.

"When I met him, trying to crawl/

"under the railway arches, he explained/

"lucidly, about the leaves he'd cut/

"from that foreign plant in the botanical gardens/

"and how he'd be especially grateful

"if I'd be so kind as to watch out

"for the pixies who had pursued him since the theft."

It's a sad, potent, yet oddly dignified portrait. That encounter made him think of the road not travelled, Oz admits.

"I had done all right for myself, starting from the same point that he came from.

"But this could have been me if something had gone wrong in my life."

The Ringmasters Apprentice by Oz Hardwick is published by Valley Press, priced £7.99. Oz will read his poems at the launch of the book at the City Screen Basement Bar from 8pm on Tuesday, November 11. Tickets £4 in advance or on the door.