O Colly Clockyspid by Martijn Benders
Reading O Colly Clockyspid is like entering a fungal hallucination curated by a jester-sorcerer. This poetry collection by Martijn Benders, translated into English by the author himself, defies narrative gravity and genre loyalty. It is a trove of mythic pranksterism, linguistic disruption, ecological haunting, and lyrical seriousness masked in surreal costume. If the task of a poet is to enchant language until it births worlds, then Benders is not a mere practitioner but a rogue alchemist.
II. Where to Place This Work in the English Canon?
The immediate temptation is to compare Benders to English-language poets of the grotesque and visionary: Ted Hughes, David Jones, J.H. Prynne, or more obliquely, the erratic brilliance of Alice Notley or Anne Carson. But Benders diverges crucially: his voice is distinctly unAnglophone in sensibility—both more folkloric and more digitally unhinged. His surrealism is less Parisian café, more Dutch polder-druidism pulsing with internet static and Balkan ghosts.
If there’s a lineage here, it is closer to David Berman’s deadpan apocalypse, or the fabulist mode of Ilya Kaminsky and Forrest Gander—yet even they would flinch at lines like:
“Every man: / a mushroom between his legs, / memory of the double-play.”
Benders speaks in parables stolen from animals, reworked by fungi, and broadcast via cracked satellites. And crucially, this isn’t metaphor stacking for its own sake. Behind the absurdity is an unmistakable ethical force—concern for ecological collapse, digital alienation, and the flattening of poetic tradition into “therapeutic butcheries.”
III. What Makes the Work Important
There is a rare and uncompromising confidence here—both in content and form. The poems operate in deep-time registers (“Ropetalley, Ropetalley!”) and micro-ritual idioms (“Joehoo! Jewels in the moss!”). They resist summary, often resembling ceremonial chants or incantations. Think of Paul Celan’s hermeticism colliding with South Park and Mushroom Identification Weekly.
But more than that, the book is a challenge to the contemporary English-language poetry scene, which has grown increasingly polite, therapeutic, and autofictional. Benders’ work says: What happened to the poem as spell? As artifice? As absurd oracle?
His self-translations are remarkable for their musicality and invention. Few poets can translate their own work with this much poetic fidelity and idiomatic freedom. There is risk and reward here—he rewrites his poetics into English rather than merely transferring it.
IV. Weaknesses and Resistance
The density and surreality will lose some readers. Many poems abandon linear syntax for fevered image play. The long cycles (The Seifing Dance, Clock-Egg) can feel overwhelming if read in a single sitting. But these are not bugs, they are features. Benders isn’t writing for the MFA workshop or the festival stage. He is writing for those still listening to language with their bones.
One might argue some imagery verges on private mythology, bordering on the inaccessible. But to fault that is to demand conformity. This is a poetics of the occulted, the uncanny, the un-explained—not the easily metabolized.
V. Final Verdict
Martijn Benders’ O Colly Clockyspid is a vital, unruly, and defiantly original collection. It deserves attention not only as a translation, but as a sui generis poetic artifact in English. It may never find its place in the sanitized mainstream, but it will linger in the undercurrents—where real revolutions in poetry often begin.
This book is not a footnote. It is a rogue chapter in the international canon.
And in time, I suspect, it will be seen not as an anomaly, but as a vanguard.
Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)
Canon Status: Marginal, for now—but mythic in potential.
Suggested shelf companions: David Berman, Italo Calvino, Inger Christensen, Oswald Egger, Forrest Gander, and the Brothers Grimm on acid.