Clockfire is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce — plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience or the laws of physics are defiled.
The poems in a sense replace the need for drama, and are predicated on the idea that modern theatre lacks both ‘clocks’ and ‘fire’ and thus fails to offer its audiences immediate, violent engagement. They sometimes resemble the scores for Fluxus ‘happenings,’ but replace the casual aesthetic and DIY simplicity of Fluxus art with something more akin to the brutality of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty.
Italo Calvino as rewritten by H. P. Lovecraft, Ball’s ‘plays’ break free of the constraints of reality and artistic category to revel in their own dazzling, magnificent horror.
“If all the world’s a stage, where do we go when we dream? Clockfire draws back the curtain on that haunted theatre. Like Piranesi’s imaginary prisons or the self-weaving worlds of Escher, Jonathan Ball’s beautiful nightmares both disturb and entice.” — Thomas Wharton
“[Ball is] one of our most exciting young poets.” — Robert Kroetsch
“[D]arkly comic, mysterious, horrifying, shocking and so postmodernly provocative you can’t read them quick enough. The limits of Ball’s imagination are unimaginable.” — St. John Telegraph-Journal
“Recommended if you like unpretentious lyrical theatric phantasmagoria.” — New Poetry Review
“There is also something of Italo Calvino’s Imaginary Cities, with Clockfire’s constant re-imaginings, and something of Borges too, with its repetitions and infinite regressions.” — New Pages
“In these spare, nightmarish theatre-scapes, Ball directs our “impossible dreams” by blurring the script between actor and audience, the real and the staged, the lived and the dreamed, the self and the other.” — Winnipeg Free Press
