This is a rich, occasionally indigestible, book for those who are familiar with the Ern Malley poems and the hoaxing of Max Harris, editor of the Literary journal Angry Penguins, who published the poems in 1943. The poems were concocted by poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart and submitted to Harris as a demonstration that disjointed nonsense could pass as modernist poetry if it were sufficiently tricked out with literary allusions and sufficiently abrasive or iconoclastic in its disregard for established poetic conventions. The Ern Malley Hoax once perpetrated took on an often farcical life of its own. Harris was prosecuted for publishing obscenity. From the beginning, some critics and poets were inclined to the view that McAuley and Stewart wrought far better than they intended and that the Malley poems could stand on their own merits. David Brooks takes the poems very seriously indeed, in a series of close readings, tracing their allusions and their elusive thread of sense that McAuley and Stewart could not entirely eliminate. Indeed, the time has come, he asserts, for an Annotated Ern Malley. This is one of several more books that Brooks proposes to augment the Malley canon. Stylistically, Sons of Clovis has its oddities. When he chooses to do so Brooks can write with clumping lead-booted obscurity. Why he should have chosen to do so is unclear, unless to construct an obstacle course for his reader. Often he will ask this brave follower, 'Have you followed me thus far?' 'Still with me?' Occasionally I felt like someone invited to participate in one of those scams where sceptics are weeded from the audience until only the credulous remain and the doors will close and the fleecing will begin. At page 243 we reach Brooks apotheosis, the celebration of Ern Malley. After speculating that the time may be ripe for an Annotated Ern, he concludes: 'for those who have stuck so bravely with me (and after one last portrait, one last argument) there is the poetry itself, glorious, luxurious,se social, profound.' The full Malley canon does follow in an appendix, though it takes another 60 pages before we get there.

I do not mean to be negative In these remarks. Sons of Clovis can be great fun to read. Brooks is often stimulating and imaginative and occasionally profound on hoaxes, literary authorship and the creation of a literary canon. But you will have to begin with some degree of commitment to Ern Malley and his poetry and a willingness to embrace the idea that nonsense can be transfigured by a hoax. There is, too, the transfiguration of the minor poets, McAuley and Stewart, whose own reputations have been partially eclipsed by that of their creation, Ern Malley. ( )