cover image Madonna Anno Domini

Madonna Anno Domini

Joshua Clover. Louisiana State University Press, $16.95 (64pp) ISBN 978-0-8071-2148-1

Something unique and transformational is going on with this winner of the 1996 Walt Whitman Award, the Academy of American Poets' distinguished first-book competition. Reading this collection is akin to channel-surfing a possessed television on which CNN shows horror films and Court TV embraces magic realism. The color blue emanates from most of the poems as if from a glowing monitor. Personal histories are mapped like landscapes, and vice versa. Victims of war or dementia are surrounded by fire and loss (""On every door in his house it was written YOUR WIFE IS NOT IN THIS ROOM.""). Poems start in mid-sentence and end just as abruptly. Titles ricochet off one another. The piece you think is about the poet's mother, is really a coming attraction for nuclear devastation: ""O mom in a tree/ close-range kissing as in Nevada just/ now they're making crazy ground-zero shapes/ of radiant see-through geography."" Clover is always in control of his language, yet is, paradoxically, sometimes hard to follow. His work exudes an uncomforting sense of comfort suggesting that he understands exactly what he means, even if that meaning is just beyond the reader's grasp. (Apr.)