Robert Cooperman, A Killing Fever

Robert Cooperman writes narrative poems about people and events. His books typically consist of cycles of poems that work as coherent units. Two of his collections are biographies of poets, In the Household of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1993) and Petitions for Immortality: Scenes from the Life of John Keats (2004). Two others are narrative cycles about events that took place in 19th-century Colorado gold-mining territory. In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (1999) won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry in 2000. The Widow's Burden (2001) was runner-up to the previous award.

Cooperman’s recent collection, A Killing Fever (Ghost Road Press, 2006), follows in the path of the two previous Colorado books. It tells the story of two Colorado girls who are raped and thrown from a cliff while they are walking in the hills outside the settlement of Gold Creek. One of the girls survives while the other does not. After nearby Indians are blamed for the crime and murdered, the local sheriff organizes a posse and sends it in search of the real culprits.

Each member of the four-man posse has a different reason for being there. The leader is John Sprockett, a notorious killer who venerates women; Sylvester McIntyre, a witness to the crime who did not immediately report it because he did not want to lose time in his hunt for gold; Percy Gilmore, a newspaper reporter from England who is hired to write about the search for the killers — he is a Russian Jew hiding his real identity — he came to America after witnessing the murders of his family by Cossacks; and William Eagle Feather, a Ute tracker. These characters are an odd fusion of Dickens and Cormac McCarthy. Their conflicting motives and perceptions, their hidden conflicts, are as much a part of the story as the murders they are seeking to avenge.

The poems narrate the progress of their search for the murderers as well as the struggles of the surviving girl and her parents to adjust to the harsh new realities of disgrace and disfigurement.

Cooperman's typical strategy is to present in each poem the voice of a different character, usually a primary character but sometimes a minor one. This is similar to the approach used by Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, though Cooperman's method is more conventional in rhetorical tone and content.

Each poem advances the story, narrated in the past tense at a particular moment in the progress of events. Each character speaks about some aspect of the story, giving his or her perspective. Each poem is no more than a page long. Some of the poems end in a small ironic moment or revelation. In one poem, for example, Percy Gilmore describes how Sprockett confronts bandits tracking the posse:

Immediately, they drew back:
infernal creatures terrified
by God’s archangel of retribution.
But one, filled with foolish bravado,
attempted to ambush Mr. Sprockett,

Who slew the craven devil
With a clap of pistol thunder.
His brother demons drew their guns,
but in a display of dazzling marksmanship,
Mr. Sprockett dispatched each
as if their hearts were bull’s-eyes.

'I’d no quarrel with them,'
Mr. Sprockett lamented.
‘Not the boys we’re looking for,’
And wiping away tears,
he led us in a short prayer
for their troubled souls.

While the first half of the book describes the hunt for the murderers, the second half describes the developing love of Percy Gilmore and Mercy, the girl who survived the attacks but is left terribly disfigured. Her father is a minister, and he is revulsed that his daughter loves a Jew. At first he views the prospect of their marriage as little better than the attack she suffered:

My poor daughter, to suffer from merciless men,
Her only salvation almost as unbearable.

Ultimately he and his wife accept their daughter’s husband. In the collection’s final poems, thirty years after the marriage, Mercy returns to the scene of the attacks and considers the past and future direction of her life. Despite the violence, suffering, and horror that scarred her, she has also had love, and the book ends on a note of determined affirmation.

There is a documentary aspect to these poems, not only in how they seek to explain events, but also in how the characters appear to testify about their roles — this is testimony not only in the sense of the courtroom, but also in a more validating, spiritual sense. The effect is reminiscent of the Spoon River poems of Edgar Lee Masters.

Cooperman is an unusual and distinctive poet. He writes against many of the current trends in modern poetry, without taking obvious exception to them. In a time when many poets make their own personae the central issue of their work, Cooperman is almost entirely self-effacing. He has never claimed a large amount of attention in the world of contemporary poets, though he is widely published in poetry magazines and journals and his books have been published by respected small presses. He deserves more attention. His dedication to poetry, narrative, and stories of the human heart and experience has been heroic.

Cooperman’s latest book is The Long Black Veil, a cycle of poems built on the well known country and folk ballad by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkins. In addition to his longer works, Cooperman has published a number of chapbooks, including A Tale of the Grateful Dead, Not Too Old to Rock an Roll, Greatest Hits, and Shooting the Elephant. He was born in New York City, attended Brooklyn College and Long Island University and then earned his PhD from the University of Denver, where he studied with John Edward Williams, author of Augustus and Stoner and other novels. He taught for a time at the University of Georgia, at Bowling Green University, and again in Denver, but for the most part he has been a truly full-time poet. He lives and writes in Denver, Colorado, where his wife is a professor of business at the University of Denver.

This review appeared in BlogCritics, http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/09/26/225453.php.

See Western Reflection Publishing Co. web site on Cooperman.