Robert Cooperman's new collection of poems A Tiny Ship upon the Sea (Greensboro, NC: March Street Press, 2007) tells the tale of two brothers, Sean and Liam O'Flynn, who become highwaymen after killing two British officers that try to impress them into the British army to fight the French. Written in a mild Irish dialect, the poems follow the usual pattern of a Cooperman narrative cycle: tracing through the voices of characters events that lead towards some important conclusion. Suffused with references to Irish history and folklore, and with hostility to priests (a familiar theme for Cooperman) and to the British, the poems relate how Sean and Liam hide out with prostitutes after killing the officers. When they quarrel, Sean leaves, taking their money with him. Liam, without money or food, seeks shelter and help from a woman names Mary living alone in the countryside. She takes him in, they become lovers, and she becomes pregnant. When she has a difficult time delivering their child, Liam goes for help and is stopped by another group of British soldiers looking for recruits. When they try to impress him, Liam shoots one of them, is imprisoned and condemned to hang.
Much of the book relates Liam's thoughts, impressions, and memories as he waits in his cell for death. These are the most interesting poems in the book. In them Liam remembers the first girl he loved, his career with his brother as a highwayman, his love for the woman in the cottage, his memory of his drunken father and of the mute sister who has incestuous designs on him. Several poems recount in minute but telling detail Liam's thoughts on the day he is to be hanged, on the scaffold as he feels the rope placed around his neck. When Liam is hanged, the rope (improbably) breaks and the man who was ministering to him as a priest reveals himself as Sean. They escape on a stolen horse. Although Liam has been told that Mary and her child died, he goes to see the cottage where she lived and discovers them both alive. They all flee, escaping the soldiers once again, and steal a boat to sail to a remote island off the Irish shores where they meet Gaelic speaking countrymen. Once islanders learn that Liam and Sean are fugitives, they send them away. In the last poem Liam, Sean, Mary, and the child are sailing out into an empty ocean, hoping to find a place to put safely in.
The collection ends abruptly. The purpose may be to give the collection an air of uncertainty, mystery, and irresolution—we don't know what happens: Liam and crew may die or live. The conclusion suggests that Cooperman is following the outline of an Irish folktale or poem, or that he is trying to end the collection with a sense of suspension (cf. "The Eve of St. Agnes"), but the real effect is abruptness and disappointment—the collection prepared us for something more tangible in the way of an ending, and it is not Cooperman's habit to leave matters unresolved in this manner.
A sub-current in the poems is Sean's desire to sail to the American colonies. He believes he can be free in America, even though the colonists like the Irish are subject to the rule of the British. This motif of escape and the desire for a life in a distant land underlies many of the poems. The collection is set during the early days of the American Revolution, and even though Ireland is the location of the story the poems tell, the principles for which the Revolution is fought—freedom, opportunity, independence from the British—are ones that mean something to Sean and Liam. This motif is more an unrealized potential in the collection, a series of hints and inferences, than a fully realized theme.
As with Cooperman's other narrative cycles—stories about the Colorado gold mine country, about Byron and Keats, about the story of the long black veil—Liam speaks with a passionate and rhetorically urgent intensity. He must tell his story. It is his very nature to do so, though we don't know to whom he speaks or where he is when he tells the tale. He is like the narrators of some of the poems of E. L. Masters and E. A. Robinson—an inveterate and essential teller of his own experience.
Despite the ending, these poems in a minor key attest to Cooperman's skill with narrative poetry. Above all else, the increasingly desperate and plaintive voice of Liam O'Flynn, as he approaches what he believes will be his death on the gallows, dominates the book.
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