Madonna anno domini Joshua Clover

I have no idea what the title means. In fact, I have no idea what most of the words mean: imbricate, heliotrope, mantic, corniced, veldt, foolscap, cacao, topiary, ichor, mendicant, seine, doyenne, suzerains, appurtenances, scarab, railment, loggia, dauphin, festoon, and my-personal-favorite: infundibuliform. Yeah bitch. And he’s talking about flowers.

Clover’s vocabulary-from-hell is only one of the reasons why the book is amazing. The second: KA-BLAM. The third: “We are having trouble placing/ our shoulders to the evening…”

It’s a wild ride and I wrote in the margins of page 15, this:

‘oh’ is yawn/ a shaped word/ a word/ we must not make/ with our hands/ in the middle/ of this touching/ taking the tickets/ settling/ The oh/ sturdy, bleak/ and fictitious/ —a sea/ -worthy boat/ oh-seas-ripped-open/ the middle/ is getting middler/ this boat/ in our suitcase/ our suitcase/ tumbling country/ to country/ pushing our faces/ to the window/ oh-meadow/ oh-breathing-city/ oh-fire-dying/ in-our-throats.

Kinda crappy, isn’t it. So I tried again on page 17, below the poem.

Let’s visit the guillotine countries, the bags used to hold the heads, the knife-flashes at sunrise. It must be a story about love—one traveler, then two—the telling of it to the crowd who is very old. I imagine her head held by the hair, this distance between the neck and the lips, and wind beating the head like a bell.

Disturbing, yes? Well, that’s the kind of thing Clover’s poetry inspires. One of his hands is in history, the other was cut off and circles his head like a bird (circles his head like a god) (circles his nead like a god-bird).

In any event, the book is good. Better than good. Almost perfect if it weren’t for the acres of unread books he spreads before me, if it weren’t for the voice in my head saying “what the fuck—what the fuck” and if it weren’t for the fact that I somehow feel sorry for him.