Book Review: A Census of Preconceptions by Oz Hardwick Dissects Modern Absurdities Through Surrealist Precision

Oz Hardwick’s A Census of Preconceptions, published by SurVision Books, is a streetwise dossier of the psychic flotsam floating through late-stage capitalism. The book straddles a barstool somewhere between the surreal and the bureaucratic, tallying up everyday encounters and existential intrusions with a wink and a grimace. This isn’t gentle lyricism. It’s prose poetry that drags its readers through office corridors, rundown waiting rooms, and myth-soaked landscapes, all narrated by a voice as likely to quote Hockney as it is to imagine monkeys stealing garden gnomes. Hardwick’s style is distinct: speculative and deadpan, laced with disarming humour and razor-wire observation.

Take Maintaining a Routine, where time is anthropomorphised into a reluctant tea guest: “I root out time like a pig snuffling for truffles… I capture time like a wasp in a wineglass.” The list of similes isn’t indulgent, it’s tactical, establishing a rhythm of obsessive calibration before snapping into a moment of eerie intimacy. “But time’s not listening, because it was there and remembers it all better than I do.” This line fractures the poem’s levity, revealing a deeper obsession with memory, loss, and the rituals we cling to in order to maintain the illusion of agency. Hardwick’s voice is assured, cynical but never cold, balancing nostalgia with a stark awareness of futility.

In Slapstick, he skewers both politics and media spectacle via a reimagined Punch and Judy show turned state broadcast: “stripped of big budgets and facial expressions, we saw the stories for the first time, their pain and passion raw as a slapped cheek.” It’s a line that reads like a mission statement for the collection. The decision to replace TV with puppetry isn’t a retreat into nostalgia. No, it’s a brutal confrontation with how absurd our reality has become, and how laughter might be the only honest response left. Here, Hardwick critiques the flattening effect of constant performance culture, showing how slapstick morphs into sinister farce when it’s all that remains.

A Census of Preconceptions, the titular piece, delivers its most biting satire. Bureaucracy becomes witch trial, and science fiction blends with contemporary malaise: “an unbiased panel of three witches and three wise monkeys… are fitted with radio mics and body-cams.” The poet targets the post-truth landscape with precise irreverence. He cautions against conflating levitation with liberation, noting that “preliminary analysis suggests a spike in shape-shifting, though this should not be mistaken for social mobility.” It’s these jabs: offbeat, surreal, and culturally scalpel-sharp, that keep the prose poems feeling urgent. The absurdities aren’t decoration; they’re structural critiques dressed in deadpan drag.

Hardwick’s aesthetic belongs squarely within the contemporary surrealist revival, but it’s filtered through a British, often urban, sensibility. Hardwick refines his chaos into taut vignettes. His is the voice of a man tallying psychological inventory with a clipboard made of dream fragments. A Census of Preconceptions doesn’t just document our cultural detritus, it animates it, pinning each glinting absurdity with forensic tenderness. It’s a collection that rewards re-reading and demands to be read aloud, preferably in a dingy room filled with echoes and the smell of stale tea. In a poetry scene often bloated with polite musings, Hardwick’s work punches clean through the gauze.

About the Author

Oz Hardwick is a European poet, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “about a dozen” full collections and chapbooks, and has won many prizes, mostly in raffles and at fairgrounds. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.