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Such exchanges animate the kingdom // of the clock, but one by one their trades / complete, blink out like eyes. The city sleeps.
Set in a vibrant yet ragged coastal city, Kingdom of the Clock is a verse novel whose interwoven storylines begin with one day’s dawn and end at the first light of the next. Within the cycles of that single day, the lives of the city’s inhabitants unfold.
An aging stock promoter presides over the fruits of his predatory life. A woman tracks her husband’s iPhone to the casino. An artist races to prevent her masterpiece from being seized to cover unpaid rent. A commuter is shaken by a private vision. A mother plots to care for her unwell adult daughter. Senior and junior partners involved in a fraud weigh the risks and rewards of betraying each other. A boy boards an oil tanker with his father in an emergency. An elderly chess player prays to the moon for his grandchild to be born alive. A homeless man does not know his father is dying.
After night’s crescendo comes the blank page of a new day. A clear, flowing lyricism fuses the many moving parts of Kingdom of the Clock into an immersive, unforgettable reading experience.
“A journey through the stratified lives of the modern city, Kingdom of the Clock exposes us all as equally flawed, yet equally capable of giving and receiving grace. Minutely detailed and fast-paced, this is a profoundly moving poem masquerading as an innovative novel – or perhaps the other way around.” Maggie Burton, author of Chores
“Daniel Cowper’s novel in couplets is a technical high-wire act, but, thanks to his gift for narrative, it never draws attention to itself. Kingdom of the Clock engrosses us in the human lives the poet renders with sympathy, wisdom, and dramatic flair. Here we have narrative poetry at its best.” Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems
“With its novelistic plot and keenly attentive verse, Kingdom of the Clock explores what it means for urban life to be human, fallible, and, ultimately, interconnected. A fantastic read!” Amy LeBlanc, author of Homebodies and Unlocking
"In Kingdom of the Clock Cowper writes with a poet’s vocabulary, intones poetic gravitas, runs the full gamut of dire life issues from life to death to greed to justice to ironic fright to riches to poverty which creates a virtual ‘tour de force’ of issues with which the reader must breathlessly keep up." Poetry & Art Reviews for Honest People
"Cowper crafts this sensitive subject matter with nuance and compassion, leading to a climax that is gasp-inducingly beautiful. Neither condemning nor absolving its characters, this musical, dense text captures the clink and fizz of modern life. Exploring the paradoxes of human behaviour, Cowper’s book flows with the insistence of rain, sometimes rushing up against the reader with the startling closeness of a passing owl’s wing." Montreal Review of Books
"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”)." British Columbia Review of Books
"Cowper’s book is an elegant, offbeat gem, a work which strikes a balance between the urgency of a gripping narrative and perceptive, piercing lyricism. They may paint it, sculpt it, write it, or drunkenly preach it on the city streets, but Cowper’s outsiders and artists bear witness to the truth that we cannot escape the natural rhythms of this world, and that despite our thieving and drinking, our recklessness and selfishness, we also cannot escape our need for the naturally embedded desires for love, companionship, and, especially, forgiveness, even as we struggle to accept them." Traces
“It is hard to give an adequate account of how much Cowper has accomplished in this magnificent book. Kingdom of the Clock works as a novel. His characters are compelling and manage to surprise both themselves and his readers.” Literary Review of Canada
“Everything here is meticulously crafted. Cowper is like a watchmaker working at the microscopic level of construction that is the poet’s true domain. This kind of storytelling has long remained the purview of large social novels, with their breadth and sprawl, the ambition of a Dickens or a Dos Passos, a Bonfire of the Vanities or, more recently, a Glass Century. But what the poem brings to the social novel is compression and precision. It attends to image and metaphor and rhythm at the level of the line. It universalizes the particular such that subjects take on the significance of myth. Precision and compression are what the big novels lack, and it’s refreshing to see this sort of thing done in verse.” New Verse Review
“The sheer vocabulary and sonic quality of this writing is impressive in its own right as the narrative – written in couplets with the tautness of poetry and the sweep of fiction – follows a cast of characters whose stories brush, collide, and ricochet through streets, offices, casinos, docks, and parks. Acting almost like Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager, Time itself abides as a presence, dictating the pace of commerce, chance encounters, rending betrayals, and spiritual revelations.” Vallum