An Interview with Poets Daniel Cowper and Emily Osborne, and Reviews of Cowper’s Kingdom of the Clock (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) and Osborne’s Safety Razor (Gordon Hill Press, 2023)
by Bill Neumire
Almost to the point of absurdity, What’s it all for? is the central question of our lives; it echoes deep in all other questions, catches us in the car as we realize we’ve been working too much and forgetting what we’re working for, whispers to us as we make our art. It’s this quintessential yearning toward an answer that drives Daniel Cowper’s verse novel, Kingdom of the Clock. But it’s also at the center of decisions that have led Cowper and his wife, poet and translator of Norse skaldic verse, Emily Osborne, to live a deliberately chosen life on the remote Bowen Island in Northwest Canada. As I was reviewing Cowper’s book, I happened to read Osborne’s translations in an issue of the Paris Review, which led me to read and review her own poetry collection, Safety Razor. I reached out to the two and asked if they might be up for answering some questions about their lives together as poets in the small island community where Cowper grew up. And, as with many of my best reading and writing experiences, this became, for me, not just about articulating thoughts on their poetry, but also about discovering how life and poetry breathe into each other, how such a rhyming couplet (sorry) moves together toward answering that driving question.
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Daniel and Emily, tell me about yourselves–your individual growing up, how you started writing, how you met, where you are now in life.
Daniel: I grew up in a log cabin on Bowen Island. It was pretty rustic when I was small: my great-grandfather had cobbled the kitchen out of old BC Hydro high-voltage crate containers, and salvaged the windows from Vancouver demolitions in the 1930s. There was no insulation or caulking between the logs; when power was knocked out, which was a few weeks every winter, we’d move our sleeping bags to the loft above the wood stove, where the air was warmest. In all seasons, we had books: the leatherette volumes of Kipling my great-grandfather gave my great-grandmother; books of poetry by Thomas Hardy and my great-grandparents’ friend Earle Birney; my father’s volumes of biology, history and satirical humour; the Beaverdime Fairy Tales my mother bought at Woodwards. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary lived on a shelf within reach of the dinner table, so it could be pulled out to settle arguments about the meaning or derivation of words.
Emily: I grew up in London, Ontario, but I was always trying to transport myself somewhere else. When not at school, I was buried in a book, at ballet or music lessons, or wandering around with my sister in our own imaginative landscape. She and I would find pockets of nature or uncanny atmosphere and pretend we were in a lighthouse by the sea, or spying on Heathcliff in a graveyard. Under the influence of my mother (a poet, and friends with other poets), I first began writing poems in Kindergarten. It was not until much later that I realized how fortunate I was to have this encouragement; for example, by the time I was eight, I was sending my poems to Fred Cogswell, and he was graciously writing back with thoughts on how I could improve my craft. I took it all very seriously and spent many hours in my little writing nook in the basement behind the wood stove (clearly the safest place to store reams of paper).
Emily: Daniel and I met by volunteering with a church group at More Than A Roof, a homeless recovery centre in Vancouver. We met outside the building one day, waiting to be buzzed up. Daniel had come straight from the office, and I was newly in Vancouver, having accepted a post-doctoral position at UBC. We “clicked” from the first moments. We shared academic and artistic interests, and felt an immediate attraction. Residents at the community, seeing us interact, thought we were married when we’d only just met. We moved full-time to Bowen Island in 2019 when we were pregnant with our first child, into a cabin Daniel built by hand. Now we have two boisterous sons (aged six and four) and I am getting to experience what Daniel’s childhood was like.
Daniel: The first thing I remember writing wasn’t a poem. I was in Grade 1, and I wrote it hiding under a table to keep it safe from profaning eyes — it was a compendium of all available knowledge concerning dinosaurs. I wrote verse from time to time, but didn’t start obsessing over my poems until I was in university.
What work makes up your livelihood? How do you make time to write, to read, to parent, to family?
Daniel: Before we had kids, I was a commercial litigator, but that kind of work is demanding and inflexible. Now that we live with our children in the countryside, I only practice law part-time. We avoid unnecessary expenses and make ends meet with investment income from our savings.
Emily: We live modestly. We drive an old car, thrift what we can, have one absurdly small bathroom, and grow and forage lots of produce for ourselves. We make our own cider instead of buying beer and wine. Our entertainments are cheap and family-oriented: reading, swimming, and going for mushroom-hunts in the forest. We are as self-sufficient as possible, which reduces expenses, but every chore takes up time. Naturally it always feels as though there is not enough time for reading or writing at this stage of life and parenting.
Daniel: Chores take time, but that time can also be used to enjoy audio books. Last year, I listened to Joyce’s Ulysses, and most of Trollope’s Barchester novels while insulating pipes, digging out a soapbox, replacing leaky taps, gathering firewood, picking berries, making cider, and building a home office — among other things. Emily and I make a practice of reading to the kids and to each other every day, so reading is something we do as a couple, and as a family. Writing, of course, requires solitude and concentration, which is always in short supply. Our writing time is mostly restricted to when the boys are at school and pre-school, but I will often try to cram some writing time in at the end of the day, after everyone else is asleep.
What is life like on Bowen Island? Do its landscapes, rhythms, community enter your poetry? Do you find that living a little apart from the mainland literary hubs influences your perspective as writers?
Daniel: Bowen is a small town. It’s the sort of place where you get to know your new neighbours pretty quickly, and where you get to watch people move through life. Our side of the island (the north-facing, rainy side) is still quite wild, so each point in the seasonal cycle stands out. Over the course of the summer, there are six kinds of wild berries we make an effort to harvest. When the blackberries are getting scarce, mushrooms start to appear, and mushroom season continues until the Winter Chanterelles are eventually spoiled by frost and rain. There is always something wonderful happening that won’t happen again until next year. The Bowen community does a good job of marking the holidays – there are well-attended public celebrations around the year, at Hallowe’en, Remembrance Day, Christmas, Easter, May Day, and a trio of weekend festivals in August, culminating in Bowfest, the island parade and fair.
Emily: Bowen Island draws artists as well as tourists. We’re lucky to have friends on the island who are writers, sculptors, painters, ceramicists, dancers, actors, movie producers and musicians. Although we sometimes miss the years when we were living close to world-class art galleries and shows in New York, NY and London, UK, we’re constantly inspired by our amazing artist friends who are accomplishing great things while living in our small community. Still, though, it can be difficult to live apart from the mainland literary community, to not be able to attend events regularly or be connected to a group through an MFA program. On the other hand, having an in-house first reader who you think is the best writer in the world is also hard to beat.
What is it like to share a household where both of you are deeply invested in poetry? Do your poetic styles influence one another? Do you notice echoes or crosscurrents in each other’s work? Do you ever feel competitive as poets?
Daniel: In close proximity to another poet, insecurity can lead to a fear of being eclipsed, but it’s been a few years since we’ve had to work through those kinds of feelings. Generally speaking, we are both pretty uncomplaining about doing our share of practicalities to keep the ship afloat, and there is more camaraderie than competition. It’s easier to be serious about making art when you have a spouse who values that art. And, of course, it’s fun, as well as romantic, to discuss an interesting word or interesting fact one of us has found; to share a thought about craft or a new draft.
Emily: Our imaginations tend to range in different areas, and it’s always surprising and exhilarating to share the avenues we’ve been pursuing (most recently, I have been thinking about Neanderthal art and Daniel about dreamscape guides). Occasionally we find an echo in each other’s work, but for the most part, I don’t think our styles influence each other. The process of knowing and thinking critically about someone else’s style, however, can really put the spotlight on the weaknesses in your own, and we’ve sharpened each other’s editorial skills. Recently we’ve been sharing more short fiction with each other, which highlighted our opposing deficiencies (one of us explains too much and the other not enough). How convenient, really, to be working towards meeting in the middle..
Emily, do you feel that your study of Old Norse poetry has given you new insights into your personal themes of family and inheritance?
Emily: This is a very interesting question, because inheritance and genealogy – both biological and poetical – were obsessions of the Norse authors. Medieval Icelandic manuscripts of literature were also filled with genealogies and poets were composing in a milieu where borrowing from or riffing on each other’s work was expected and encouraged. Poetry was, in that society, one of the main conduits for the passing down of history and memory. As a twenty-first-century scholar, one of my tasks was to interrogate this passing down, to consider how art shaped the presentation of history and vice versa. And I think these ideas really infiltrate my poetry in Safety Razor, where I write about how the navel-gazing quality of anthems distort a national identity (in a mock anthem for Antarctica); how museum-goers “read” dinosaur bones or devotional art; and how Jumbo the Elephant was represented in the media of his and our day. When I turn to more intimate examinations of my own biological inheritance, I tend to view them in the context of some larger mytho-religious framework, as do many writers, because I think we understand that the self-mythologizing we do in semi-autobiographical writing is more interesting and relevant to readers when it is connected to a bigger picture or another framework with which it’s in dialogue. One of those “frameworks” I included in Safety Razor were my translations of Old Norse poetry on subjects related to those in my own poetry: this was partly because having that kind of dialogue across one thousand years is fascinating, and also because I wanted to honour a particular wish of the medieval Norse poets, who spoke frequently about wanting their verse to be passed on and reperformed for audiences far and wide.
Daniel, what has a career in law taught you about poetry, and vice versa?
Daniel: From the craft of legal argumentation, the most important lesson I have learned is the power of clarity. It is very difficult to compel agreement if you can’t make yourself understood; and clarity, in itself, is compelling. My experience as a lawyer has also altered my sense of what other people are like. As a litigator, I’ve learned that people and their lives are weirder and more complicated than commonly believed. One opposing counsel told me: “Some mice live off the cheese; my clients live off the holes in the cheese.” That perspective helped shape how I described the workings of the city in Kingdom of the Clock.
In Kingdom of the Clock, the refrain, “What’s it all for?” drives the book. How would each of you venture an answer to that very question?
Daniel: I suspect that, for most people, there are a small number of things they really care about, but those things can be hard to identify. Long ago, when deciding whether to pursue an academic career or not, I decided three things were critical to my own happiness: that I be able to live where I choose; that I be able to support my family; and that I be able to write. Most, if not all of my major choices as an adult have flowed from identifying those three things.
Emily: I don’t pretend to know, but I’ve seen that uncertainty work out for good so long as I give my all to the things I’ve been entrusted with. For example, after deciding to leave academia, I wondered what was the point of a PhD in Old Norse. The opportunity to translate an anthology of skaldic verse with Norton/Liveright has been this unexpected flowering from my desire not to let the knowledge fester. Another example would be my practice of ballet: I’ve recently come back to ballet after a twenty-year hiatus, and am finding the practice incredibly joyful but also stimulating to my writing. I even learned that my ancestor who founded Dance Magazine was also a literary translator (German to English). I love how these connections accrue meaning over generations. Right now, I’m focusing on tending these things: my marriage to Daniel, our two boys’ lives, relationships in my community, my practices of writing and dancing, and our home. For years I said that, if I ever owned a home, I wanted to practice hospitality. I’m still working on that because I am far from an exemplary housekeeper and rarely feel “ready” to have people visit, but Bowen Island is the kind of place where people pop by unannounced, and I want people to always feel welcome. When people do visit, they generally say two things: “Wow, you have a lot of books,” and “Wow, it feels good to be here – your house feels spiritually healthy.”
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A poet and scholar of Old Norse, Emily Osborne mixes translations of skaldic verse with contemporary lyrics in her debut poetry collection Safety Razor, a book that thrives on tensions—between danger and safety, intellect and intimacy, myth and memory. That double-edge resonates across three sections: First Cuts, Bare Bones, and Flesh Meets. The opening section situates Osborne’s voice within family memory, tinged by wonder and threat, as in the collection’s first poem, “Infant amnesia,” which begins with a moment of elemental danger: “Thunder strums through my earliest memory / of family dinner. Summer in Ontario, // lightning pulses on the table.” The natural world here is not simply background—it intrudes into domestic space, destabilizing safety. Tornados, sirens, and basements mingle with the infant’s high chair. This friction becomes one of the collection’s recurring motifs, which plays out in a whimsically calculated soundscape. The linguistic riffing with bodily imagery where the dense alliteration of the poet’s style creates a thicket of sound, forces readers to wrestle with the poems physically, even while being enchanted by them, exemplifying Osborne’s poetic habit: intellect and intimacy intertwined.
Interspersed throughout the collection are Osborne’s translations of Old Norse skaldic verse, which function as luminous interludes and thematic foils. In “Sonatorrek,” the grief of Egill Skallagrímsson resonates with Osborne’s own meditations on family loss:
…………………………The cruel sea hacked
…………………………through the fence of my kin.
…………………………A gap rots, unfilled,
…………………………where my sons flourished.
…………………………I carried one son’s corpse.
…………………………I carry word-timber,
…………………………leafed in language,
…………………………from the speech-shrine.
Here, the act of carrying a corpse parallels the act of carrying words—language itself becomes a kind of memorial timber. For Osborne, the skaldic tradition is not an academic curiosity but a living lineage of grief and song. Similarly, “Verse-making” celebrates the art of composition in striking kennings:
…………………………Goddess of the rune-carved mead mug,
…………………………I’ve smoothed the prow of this song-ship.
…………………………Lovely lady, tree who carries cups,
…………………………I deftly ply my tongue, the lathe of poems.
By weaving these translations into her own collection, Osborne creates a dialogue between the medieval and the modern, between inherited forms and contemporary subject matter.
The third section of Osborne’s Safety Razor, Flesh Meets, turns toward love, marriage, pregnancy, and parenthood. Here Osborne’s language becomes more vulnerable, though no less inventive. In ‘20-week scan,’ the wonder of new life is shadowed by uncertainty:
…………………………After the first
…………………………made-up years, our words static back
…………………………until we’re parent ships projecting signals,
…………………………hoping you’ll echo. The bigger you grow,
…………………………the less we know you’ve heard us—
…………………………our sonar broken
…………………………on open ocean.
Though family and the body provide the emotional spine, the book ranges widely in subject matter. The poet writes about climate change in a mock-hymn to Antarctica; she writes about history’s exploitation in ‘Jumbo,’ where the circus elephant becomes a symbol of human greed and anthropomorphic projection. The collection is, above all, a debut that refuses to choose between the intellectual and the personal, between scholarly rigor and lyric vulnerability. Osborne’s poems are both erudite and intimate, sharp and precise. What lingers after reading is not only the poet’s command of sound and image, but her insistence on continuity: that our lives are always haunted by ancestors, myths, and the words we inherit; that language itself is a razor we must handle with care.
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Unfolding in twenty-four sections—each aligned to an hour—Daniel Cowper’s Kingdom of the Clock is an ambitious, densely layered verse novel that lets us listen in on the frequencies of a coastal city across one full day and night. The sheer vocabulary and sonic quality of this writing is impressive in its own right as the narrative–written in couplets with the tautness of poetry and the sweep of fiction–follows a cast of characters whose stories brush, collide, and ricochet through streets, offices, casinos, docks, and parks. Acting almost like Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager, Time itself abides as a presence, dictating the pace of commerce, chance encounters, rending betrayals, and spiritual revelations. The dramatis personae includes tech bros, salmon fishers, hermits, stock market grifters, lonely commuters, parents caring for ill children, an elderly chess player praying for his grandchild’s survival, and an artist named Viró who has sacrificed rent payments to finish her first sculpture masterpiece. Each character–even the salmon intoning, “What’s it all for if not to leap / upstream to the slopes where firm snows sleep?”–has their own variation on the novel’s central refrain, the question that echoes through the streets, over the waves, and even in the thoughts of nonhuman life. Sometimes the question is idealistic, as Anna asks, “What’s it all for, if not / to let us go safely among strangers?”; sometimes it’s mercenary: “But what’s it all for, Connor asks himself, / if not to make us rich?”; sometimes magnanimous: “What’s it all for, he [Samson] thinks, if not mercy?”; sometimes defiant: “What’s it all for, / Vanessa thinks, if not to let us fail, / fuck up, and try again?”; and sometimes simple and natural as “[w]aves chop with a repeating phrase: / What’s it all for? What’s it all for?”.
Cowper’s city is both machine and ecosystem with an economy that runs on stock manipulation, gambling, and Ponzi schemes, but is also porous to nature: gulls, salmon, the moon’s pull on the tide. The city is a place fraught with NDAs, stock market cons, gamblers and murders, yet one where “the sinner who drinks at dawn” can still watch “herons with necks cocked / like flintlocks” against the gantry cranes as the natural encroaches in its grandly reminding way. Like gears catching in sequence, the novel’s formal design brilliantly mirrors its setting: each section’s closing line transforms into the next section’s opening. In one such transition, “Down slopes above the kingdom of the clock” becomes “In hills above the kingdom of the clock,” a mechanical echo that mimics the forward tick of time. This is a book of big questions, and its characters’ choices are shaped by greed, love, guilt, and the search for meaning. Given the existential nature of the story’s motif, it’s not surprising that religious references juxtapose the more hollow corporate d-baggery throughout: there are biblical allusions, (especially in names such as Samson and Enoch), Zoroastrianism teachings, and Hindu philosophies like “Even the maya is the maya.” In this kingdom, money rarely redeems; in fact, it is often the catalyst for ruin. Against this, Cowper sets meditations on identity and impermanence:
…………………………What are we? What answers
…………………………our gazes in mirror-mazes or from
…………………………surfaces of ponds? Are all our selves mirages,
…………………………false oases tricking a tribe lost
…………………………among arid atoms and abstract energies?
One character, a poor young artist named Viró, is so broke she’s turned to theft and is being evicted, yet amid this loss, she’s created a sculpture—a mobile of creatures that spin around a tree—a metaphor for the novel itself: each figure cycling in its orbit, part of a larger mechanism. Viró’s “worthless” art becomes the most valuable thing in her apartment, and a hint to readers about one true way to find real value and purpose. Even as the artist asks herself, “What’s it all for? / (…) To give physical form // to some ideas?”, the response might actually be “yes.” Cowper moves from one character’s consciousness to another in quick cuts, though the pattern emerges in repetition and return; meanwhile, the ocean is omnipresent as workplace, as escape, as grave. Enoch, a former sailor, muses on burial at sea that offers “the neatest, cleanest funeral in the world.” Connor, conned by his business partner Jack, jumps from a bridge (and Jack is later murdered by his own partner-in-crime); his body drifts through the harbour to come to rest against Enoch’s boat. Life continues. Deals are struck, prayers are uttered, betrayals are set in motion. The clock resets. Rather than neatly cloying and comforting, the final image of the narrative is stark and impersonal:
…………………………The kingdom’s myriads of eyes still
…………………………lidded. No love or loneliness left. No self.
…………………………No selves.
…………………………(…)
…………………………Dark winds tick.
In an interview with Alex Curial for the Bowen Island Undercurrent, Cowper said that he situates Kingdom of the Clock in the lineage of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, embracing the challenge of sustaining “poetic excitement” over novelistic length. The result is an impressive, immersive experience that is less, in the end, about answering what it’s all for than about holding the question open to leave readers more awake, more aware. All of these characters, as with the rest of us, are out there
…………………………………………………………………………To chase
…………………………the chalice of art or other addiction
…………………………down blocks of asphalt street. To veil
…………………………the fear of death with wealth or defy
…………………………that fear with humdrum chores of love.
Here, then, is a toast to the chalice of art and to the humdrum chores of love that Cowper’s circuitous tale ultimately leads us back to.
Bill Neumire’s second collection of poems, #The New Crusade, is available from Unsolicited Press. He serves as poetry editor for Verdad.
