Clover's Log 
Poems by Steven R. Cope
    

 

Read a review: New Southerner

Clover's Log, 97 pages, ISBN 1893239233, softcover, $14.00.

This book is available at your local bookstore or from on-line vendors such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or directly from the publisher

About Steven Cope

Book Order Form
Other books from Wind

Other books by Steven Cope:
In Killdeer's Field
Sassafras
The Book of Saws
Crow !


Wind Publications
600 Overbrook Dr
Nicholasville, KY 40356

e-mail:
     

Clover's Log, authentic to its core, is a lovely elegy for childhood, love, family, animals, land, and self. Occasionally its landscape is lit by streaks of violence, and by foxfire, but always by the soothing psalmic voice of the poet "singing oh--- / like a prodigy." 
                        --- Joe Survant

In Steven Cope's Clover's Log we hear a voice of ancient newness. Cope forges the pastoral tradition in the fires of the contemporary idiom so that his fields and trees, streams and shadows shimmer with the familiar strangeness of legend. The book rings with an iron elementalism and flinty nerve that captivates. 
                      --- Michelle Boisseau

The best poems are records of the mind grappling with itself---with love, with mood, with puzzling out the lineaments of the world. Clover's Log is filled with such poems---passionate, unsparingly honest---episodes of the heart. The language is spare and gleaming. The result of this combination is a very strong collection from a seasoned poet. 
                       --- Richard Taylor 


Click HERE for more information about author Steven Cope, erstwhile rock and country singer, throwback hippie, folk singing guitarist and songwriter, poet, novelist, former you-name-it, brother to animals and tree-hugger, one foot proud hillbilly, the other grafted-Indian, sooner sit on a rock than own a megaplex.    

From Clover's Log --

Night Song

Now when all the green men
are hidden in trees,

and the silver sun of the moon
has banked deep into a storm,

we come, you and I, impoverished, frail,
to replenish ourselves.

We drink the blown leaves
and suck the hailed corn, turning, twirling,

mounting wood and stone, wet skin of the earth:
we are alive in such a world.

It is the dark flower in your hair,
the dirt in my nails.

..

       illustration by Julie Baumgardner

How is it that you,
a monkey with two
tails, have been able
to endure despite your
handicap, and not only
to endure but to outdo
in accomplishment
even normal monkeys
with single tails?

Illustration and text from The Book of Saws by Steven Cope