Joshua Clover, _Madonna Anno Domini_

SOMEONE WHOSE OPINIONS I heed recommended this as one of the best volumes of poetry to appear in the 1990s, so off to amazon.com I went. The cover art was impressive -- it reproduces a print by Guy Debord -- but the jacket flap photo disturbed me a bit: a handsome man in shades and tousled hair, shirt open to reveal a surfer's torso, standing in front of a magnificent mountain landscape. People that photogenic shouldn't be good poets as well. It isn't fair.

Turns out Joshua Clover is, in addition to being a writer of poems, a writer of philosophically rigorous leftist politico-cultural essays and the son of an influential feminist scholar and critic, Carol Clover, and writes a blog called "Jane Dark's Sugarhigh," which got my attention, since Jane Dark is a character in the excellent novel Notable American Women by Ben Marcus, himself the son of an influential feminist scholar and critic, Jane Marcus. Hmm and hmm. So Clover is not only good-looking, not only a denizen of magnificent landscapes, but was born well-connected to the American arts-&-letters world. All this and he is supposedly a good poet too. So not fair.

But I have to admit -- an extremely good book. Oddly enough, it reminded me of a book published four years later, Spencer Short's Tremolo, which as fortune had it I read first. Witty, often elegant, knowingly allusive (as in "Ouro Prêto," which is about Elizabeth Bishop without naming her), very serious about not taking itself too seriously (a poem about nuclear tests in Nevada begins, "Ka-boom!"), faintly giving the impression that the writer has occasionally made some very risky personal choices... all in all, the epitome of Iowa City, circa mid-90s...

...which sounds dismissive, but the Graham Era must have been an extremely interesting time to be in Iowa City, if this book and Short's and Radio Radio and Robyn Schiff's Worth are anything to go by. Virtually every poem here has the dazzle and audacity of a high-wire act. They sometimes seem born of wilfully perverse self-assignments to combine elements as heterogeneous as possible -- continental railroads and Buddhism, Haussmann's Paris and Rodney King -- so as to yield a poem that seems compelling and inevitable. Clover seems always to be telling himself, "I bet I can't do this," then doing it. And having fun doing it.

A very gifted writer. Despite his galling advantages.

And then one hears he was invited to be in the anthology Legitimate Dangers and opted out. What, he can afford to turn down chances to be in an anthology? Not fair at all.