‘What’s it all for?’
Kingdom of the Clock: A Novel in Verse
by Daniel Cowper
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2025
$24.95 / 9780228023715
Reviewed by Joe Enns
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Daniel Cowper makes bold decisions in his new book Kingdom of the Clock (a novel set in verse) by blending fictional narratives with poetic devices. Kingdom of the Clock approaches the city itself as a plural entity, a network of characters—“the kingdom’s stochastic litany”—that interact and bounce off each other during a twenty-four hour period from one dawn until the next.
Bowen Island resident Cowper (Grotesque Tenderness) splits the book into twenty-four chapters, each representing an hour on the sundial—“a patchwork of woods and bogs estrange our hours // from other hours, enforce the rule: / chronology is destiny.” The entire book is written in couplets with stuttered line breaks between scenes, which condenses the language to a concise phrase level that allows Cowper to play with sound, rhythm, and line break insights that might appear too extravagant in regular prose. For example, with lines like “walked dogs drop blobs” and “anyone who’s been there knows // the benthos isn’t where life begins / but where it goes,” Cowper takes full advantage of wordplay to amplify imagery.
One of the more central characters, Viró, is a struggling artist who is months late on her rent. Viró has constructed a finely balanced mobile structure of winged and wingless creatures that spin around a tree fastened by fishing line. This mobile sculpture works as an excellent metaphor for what Cowper builds with Kingdom of the Clock: each spirit cycling through their story (“some puppet self”) like ticking gears inside an elaborate clock. Viró’s mobile creates an effective bridge between the characters’ inner landscapes, the bustling city, the natural geography, and the solar system in general: “shadows cast by streetlights / chase, swing past like clock hands while replacements // grow unseen behind.”
Balancing fiction and poetry always comes with a set of trade-offs that stem from conditioned reader expectations. With fictional prose, readers tend to expect a strong narrative, a rising tension, and a clarity of information transfer. Too much tonal repetition and rhythmic patterns can be seen as a distraction. More signal and less noise. In poetry, readers expect a certain emotional field derived from the creative expression of sound, inventive imagery, and formal play that creates deeper insights. Writers often struggle to combine these qualities without coming across as overwrought and pedantic.
In Kingdom of the Clock, however, Cowper successfully sets the expectations from the beginning. The reader recognizes this is primarily a book of poetry. If Cowper had used a prose form instead, readers may have been turned off.
While Cowper takes full advantage of both the poetic and fictional elements in his work, he is still bound by trade-offs. Kingdom of the Clock is packed with vivid imagery and insightful phrasing. Cowper’s word choices and rhythms chime with brilliance throughout (“tonal phrases programmed / into flightpaths”). Even so, prioritizing sound and rhythm in a narrative sacrifices clarity. I often found myself disoriented, either due to meandering language, shifting settings, or head-hopping point of view, and found myself reading a passage multiple times to get the point. In a book of poetry, though, I believe this can be a strength and I was always rewarded upon rereading.
While Cowper’s phrasing and word choices create patterns that span chapters and match the mood of the time of day, the reliance on sound to choose verbs can sometimes lead to repetition. From the first page, the use of the words “click” and “tick” provide an aha! moment that the city is one big clock and the people are the gears—“a breeze spins / Viro’s mobile crucifix, its elements // clinking when they contact, voiced like / a tilted rainstick.” Later, as the book progresses, these verbs can become a distraction. Kingdom of the Clock is not short on imagery, though, and even if these word choices can distract, they also build a strong motif that underpins the book’s ideas.
The futility of capitalism is a strong theme throughout the book (“what’s it all for, if you lose // what we make? / You need a new phone, he says”). Maybe it’s a bias of mine, but I assume to book is referring to Vancouver as the city (the city I’m most familiar with), and it’s difficult for me to walk around Vancouver without thinking about the extravagance of capitalism. All the characters in Kingdom of the Clock ask, “What’s it all for?” with their own justifications. As well, many of the characters are involved in outright Ponzi schemes, not to mention broader accepted schemes like stock trading or gambling or religion (“the kingdom of the clock’s illicit // and official fictions”). Is capitalism itself one big Ponzi scheme? A dog-eat-dog world with money as the ultimate fiction? For Cowper’s characters, these schemes lead to disaster: addiction, greed, and desperate actions (“whatever helps / in blind depths where the dogfish hunt”). By demonstrating the internal conflict of each character, Cowper allows the reader to empathize even as the characters act immorally.
Compared to a novel-length work, the word count of Kingdom of the Clock is not huge (considering the book is 199 pages and written in couplets). Within this limited space, Cowper is still able to portray many diverse main and supporting characters with character arcs in the present, complete with backstory. Cowper achieves this by bouncing in and out of each character’s story (“forms that merge // animal and soul with implements”), glimpsing their conflicts and perspectives and then moving on in the same way one might watch the figures rotating through Viró’s mobile.
*
Joe Enns is a writer, painter, and fisheries biologist on Vancouver Island. His writing has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, FreeFall, The Fiddlehead, GUSTS, and Portal Magazine; he’s also contributed book reviews to Event and The Malahat Review. Joe has a BA in Creative Writing and a BSc in Ecological Restoration. [Editor’s note: Joe has reviewed Nick Thran, Zane Koss, Sean Arthur Joyce, Cathy Stonehouse, Clint Burnham, Nadine Sander-Green, Spenser Smith, Rodney DeCroo, Barbara Pelman, Karl Meade, M.W. Jaeggle, Ali Blythe, Emily Osborne, Will Goede, and Evelyn Lau for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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