Tick Talk

Five million people sleep “in stacks / of glass and steel” at the beginning of Daniel Cowper’s Kingdom of the Clock. It is six in the morning, and most of the city has not yet awakened to do its business of loving, chasing, and haggling. The novel in verse presents a day in its citizens’ lives parcelled out into twenty-four chapters, each of which encompasses one hour. It is a tight frame in which much happens. The plot includes sex, births, and deaths, to be sure, but also small gestures, like commuters flicking the screens of their phones and the careful unwrapping of a Babybel cheese.

Cowper’s blank verse couplets consist of lines that hover around ten syllables, like an iambic pentameter that has loosened its belt. They are enjambed and propulsive, and their forward motion is strengthened by another formal element: the last line of each chapter is echoed in the first line of the next. There is a breathing or wavelike aspect to the chapters as well, as they alternate between close focus and wide view, between many brief scenes and long strands of story.

Connor is in love, or something like it, with Vanessa, a charismatic barista and playwright. He knows the next step is marriage, but he has other ambitions on his mind. He and his business partner, Jack, are energetically fleecing venture capitalists by offering them a stake in Omniopticon, a scam surveillance company. The wittily abbreviated O‑Con is just one of many grafts, perhaps also a sly joke about the poet’s all-seeing perspective. Meanwhile, Vanessa’s old friend Viró is about to be evicted. Worse yet, the landlord’s son has spotted her magnificent hanging sculpture and claims he has the right to seize it.

Other plot lines are woven throughout. Mehrdad cares for his granddaughter, Larissa, while his son and his daughter-in-law wait to see if their newborn will survive. Coral tries to keep Mark from losing their savings in the casino. Enoch, a painter and helmsman, spends time with his child after school, before unexpectedly having to bring him on a ship that is “one bad bump from a spill.” Some characters are closely linked; others brush up against one another for a second. As the hours pass, their connections become clear, until the story comes into view like a large-scale sgraffito painting, layers peeking through scratched layers.

The most important characters, however, are not people. One is the city, a fictionalized version of Vancouver that some of its denizens think of as a utopia and others experience as Dante’s Inferno. The other is the sea. It can be erotic: Vanessa steps into the water and “prostrate waves adore her soles, // their chill labia licking gooseflesh up her legs.” But it is also a ticking clock of its own, as when the narrator reminds us of “the Big One,” the massive earthquake and corresponding tsunami to come.

Until that catastrophe, the Kingdom’s inhabitants “chase / the chalice of art or other addiction // down blocks of asphalt street.” Some, like Viró, want to hold on to what they have created. Others, like Mehrdad, whose alcoholism and spousal abuse have alienated his family, hope for reintegration. Many want status or sex, such as the businessmen who flirt with interns at a bar after work: “Swinging dicks gulp / cocktails while juniors sip.” That some encounter misfortune on their quests is a given. A scrappy Pomeranian named Percival has his paw crunched under his owner’s high heel, much as the Arthurian knight Perceval was punished and watched the Holy Grail escape his grasp.

Shifting perspectives allow readers to trace the thrumming economy of money, art, booze, and love. Vanessa throws a toonie at a beggar, unaware that the cheap liquor he will buy with that gift will bring him close to death, then back to life. Over and over, people wonder, “What’s it all for?” It seems a clichéd way to demand the meaning of life, but in this world, they might as well be asking the price. When Murray, another rapacious businessman, sees Viró’s artwork, a web of angelic creatures suspended on “tethers of fishing line,” he wonders if it’s “an economy of pain? Of grace?” It’s a fine reading of Kingdom of the Clock.

It is hard, in a few paragraphs, to give an adequate account of how much Cowper has accomplished in this magnificent book. To begin with, and perhaps least obviously, Kingdom of the Clock works as a novel. His characters are compelling and manage to surprise both themselves and his readers. Their stories move forward rapidly but are carefully built, with the significance of early tiny details becoming clear only in retrospect. Cowper does have a tendency to make artists noble and magnates grotesque, but he resists the urge to make them only that. All of the Kingdom’s citizens are wanting. And some of them get the ending they deserve.

At the same time, Cowper offers the sensuous pleasures and insights of verse. His metaphors fuse nature, technology, and human life: a nervous mother’s “thumbnails click / her fingernails like a sequence of switches.” Elsewhere, he harmonizes the city’s sounds through internal rhyme and assonance. At breakfast, “toasters ding when their springs release, // bowls flecked with cereal clink in sinks / and seagulls keen.”

Cowper has a gift for arresting images that also develop the story. As the sun rises, Connor eats breakfast at his window, looking at “his bleary, slowly self-erasing / likeness on the glass.” It is a perfect snapshot of a man who has already lost himself. A bus drives by “glittering sheets of condo curtain wall // that show, like screensavers, gliding icons / of innumerable gulls.” The suggestion might be that the people inside those condos have become machinery as well. Visual motifs echo one another, adding more beams to the poem’s structural frame. In one scene, Viró throws a cigarette filter from her bedroom and “watches it flitter // like a de‑winged moth” into the alley below. The moment is told in slow motion, so it can seep in. Many things in the book will follow that falling arc.

Human beings are not, it turns out, alone in the Kingdom. They are with animals, ghosts, and spirit creatures who, at times, deign to protect them. Worrying parents turn to old currencies of faith as they bargain to save their families. Cowper weaves Buddhist mantras, Catholic and Zoroastrian prayers, and Haida beliefs into Kingdom of the Clock. That the result is as buoyant as Viró’s kinetic, awe-inspiring sculpture is a testament to his skill.