Clover’s Log
Steven R. Cope
Wind Publications, 2004
97 pp., $14.00
Steven R. Cope is a latter day troubadour singing the matter of Kentucky. He has published a novel, a book of fables, four collections of poetry, and a book of children’s verse. He is also a singer/songwriter/album producer, signed with BMI, who gives guitar lessons.
The troubadours invented Romance, defined chivalry, and gave us the legends of King Arthur. Cope is as romantic as his medieval predecessors, but his knight errant is a slippery Kentucky mountain creature named Clover. Cope warns us that “it would be pointless — and fruitless — to try and determine who Clover actually is.” Sometimes he’s the mad son of a mad father, sometimes a Christ-like tree sprite alive in a dogwood, “the cross sprung from his heels, / blood trailing from all his branches.” (“Dogwood,” p. 5) Sometimes he’s an incompetent hunting companion: “And I prayed I guess harder / than one of Clover’s gut-shot deer . . .” (“Animals I Have Been,” p. 25). Once, in a long poem called “For the Love of Renee” (pp. 29-32), he seems to be an arsonist
free to jeer at the cops
in their bright shiny badges
. . .
And to make love on the floor after
As befits a lyricist, Cope writes a nimble free verse that flirts with a regular metric. He tends toward a line of three stressed syllables, but he won’t let that become a pattern. Perhaps because he’s a guitarist, he is fond of the triplet feet of English poetry, the dactylics and anapestics. Such metric runs give his verse an irregular heartbeat, as in the lines quoted above from “Animals I Have Been:” the anapestics of “and I prayed I guess harder” are followed by a perfect iambic tetrameter “than one of Clover’s gutshot deer.” His colloquial diction and straightforward grammar play against the sophistication of his prosody.
Steve Cope loves the persona poem. Of Clover’s Log, Cope has said “a complex persona is evolving from poem to poem right up to the last line of the book . . .” (e-mail correspondence with author, 2005). It is tempting to think of Clover as the Appalachian mountain man driven mad by too many drugs, too many coal mines:
. . . Clover of the chapped lips
and the loose canine tooth. Clover
. . .of the wilted life . . .
(“Our Nameless Harbor on Bell Street,” p.77)
But Clover won’t be neatly tapped into that square hole. He is more than that. Half-wild bumbler and criminal though he may be, Clover is associated with all that is holy in this book, and like Clover, the holy things have become somewhat depraved, painful for our romantic poet to contemplate.
In Clover’s Log, Steven R. Cope deals with both the stereotype and the archetype of the Kentucky mountaineer. Clover seems kin to the Native American Coyote, a trickster, a holy fool, one who is often tripped up by his own mischief, as we are tripped up by Cope’s tricky poetic line.
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Originally published in the Summer 2006 issue of The New Southerner.
