Book Review: "Kingdom of the Clock: A Novel in Verse" by Daniel Cowper

Reviewed by Brittney Congleton

Kingdom of the Clock: A Novel in Verse by Daniel Cowper (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025).

Reviewed by Brittney Congleton

The titular kingdom in Daniel Cowper’s most recent work, The Kingdom of the Clock, is a sprawling, beautiful, treacherous, and coastal metropolis. It is a city much like Vancouver, rendered as a modern-day Babylon and cast along the edge of an unnamed ocean; its orderly, massive, mechanical sheen stands in stark counterpoint to the wildness of the natural world which lies just beyond its borders.

Switches click. Wheels spin. In stacks 
of glass and steel five million citizens

still sleep. Dawn nears. Clocks will mete out time 
in twenty-fourths, measure moments

by the pace at which hearts beat 
and break ...

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. It is a novel in verse which spools out its tales of the dangers and distractions of contemporary urban life in lean, taut couplets whose compressed lines yield a vivid, kaleidoscopic view of those unmoored and lost in the disorienting, savage swirl of the modern city. The book’s interconnected storylines follow an impressive range of characters across a twenty-four-hour period; among its many subjects are lawyers and artists, boat captains and baristas, fraudsters and scammers, retirees and roofers. They live in gleaming modern condos with seaside views, in pseudo-hippie art communes, on board the floating decks of boats, and within the walls of refurbished, backyard storage sheds.

The book documents the city and its many characters with the soberness of journalistic detail, yet it is driven by an inner narrative propulsion and infused with lines that zip and swoon and sing with the music of the best, and most precise, poets. Cowper parcels out the storylines of his characters in condensed episodes reminiscent of vignettes: a homeless man nearly drinks himself to death on Shaoxing rice wine in a cedar hedge, a father and son guide the corpse of a dead seal from the beach out to sea for a proper burial, a penniless artist tries to save her winged wax sculptures from the clutches of a greedy landlord. As the narrative unfolds, we see Cowper pull strands such as these back up to the story’s surface, their subtle reappearance revealing them to be threads tied to a much larger, ornate tapestry.

Some of the city’s citizens have bought into the illusion which the kingdom offers, namely, that submission to this artificial construction of time and money and desire will yield wealth and immortality. Others are less certain, uncomfortably tethered to the cityscape, occasionally aware of the pull towards more natural ways of living which beckon from beyond the kingdom.

...list the house and buy
nothing grand, A clearing at road’s end,

with hens for Meghan to guard from mink and coyote,
with cherry trees to pick. A produce stand

by the highway - even just a dropbox with a jar...

This simpler, wilder, and more primal form of life is yearned for by a number of Cowper’s characters, who are seeking a respite from the cold, calculated logic of laws and business acumen, from the lure of casinos and the pallid spectres of drug addiction, homelessness, and suicide. Kingdom of the Clock posits that we have taken on a way of life that is unnatural, that aligns itself with artificial spaces and cycles which are driven by ledgers and overseas bank accounts rather than the sun and the moon and the seasons.

We remember, we remember! Clocks 
have revived our memory of rocks

ticking downstream;

...What’s it all for if not to leap
upstream to the slopes where firn snows sleep?

It is those who exist on society’s outer edges or who possess an artist’s eye who grasp that something is amiss amid the seas of concrete and the steel edifices dotting the skyline. 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.

...Ken bows his head. 

Glen knows he’s praying -

                                                    It’s such a waste, 
Glen thinks. If I’ll always relapse, go back

to sin, isn’t it a sin to let them try 
to trust me again?

...Glen turns his head

to the wall, but Ken kneels by his side 
till his brother’s asleep.

This is the tension which drives Kingdom of the Clock, where atonement is longed for but grace is uneasily accepted. Cowper has crafted a conflicting mosaic of hours, an acknowledgement that renewal is just a day away, if we can see it, and that the prevalence of sinners does not disprove the urgent need for saints. Any chance for salvation and reconciliation will demand we exist in a state of true empathy, where we dispense with our selfishness and fear, and have the courage to confront both the best and the worst of ourselves. Cowper’s work prods us to tacitly acknowledge that without a disciplined mindfulness and a

sense of purpose, modern life can quickly become a ruined, wrecked hull, and if we are to right the ship, or find a way off it, we must be brave enough to ask, as many of Cowper’s characters do as one of the book’s central motifs, “what’s it all for?”

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Britt Congleton holds degrees from Asbury University and KU Leuven. He is an English Instructor (Adjunct) at Midway University, and is currently developing several short stories of his own.

Daniel Cowper’s poetry and critical writing has appeared in numerous publications in Canada, the US, Ireland, and the UK. His poems have been collected in The God of Doors (winner of the Frog Hollow Press Chapbook contest) and Grotesque Tenderness (MQUP, 2019). His latest work is Kingdom of the Clock, a novel in verse about urban life. He is a contributing editor with New Verse Review, and lives on Bowen Island with his wife Emily and their children.