Böcker av Robert Cooperman

The reality of life on (and off) the high seas during the Golden Age of Piracy comes alive in this finely crafted collection of swashbuckling sonnets. While each can easily stand alone, together these sonnets form a novel in verse that crests as dramatically an ocean wave. And like any great novel, Hell at Cock's Crow is impossible to put down. The reader quickly becomes immersed in the colorful and often brutal world Robert Cooperman portrays, eager to learn the fates of characters ranging from the swaggering captain whose piracy has unexpectedly noble origins, the murderous cook, and the reluctant novice marauder to their equally scheming, plundering, lust-filled, and lost female shipmates. Enjoy this salty, imaginative, memorable book.-Lynda La Rocca, winner of the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest and author of Unbroken Part a story of crime and justice, part seafaring yarn-complete mayhem-the five and a half dozen sonnets that make up Hell at Cock's Crow spin a tale worthy of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The morally ambiguous pirate captain, James Raven, a ruthless rapist driven by greed but a would-be Robin Hood to the enslaved, and his even bigger-than-life consort, the "New Christian" Miranda Iglesias on one side, Kathleen Munro and her lover Billy Butcher, for a time wavering members of Raven's crew, on the other, the tension mounts, and nobody, really, comes out of it unblemished. The rhythm of the Shakespearian sonnets, ABBACDDCEFFEGG, mimics the rolling sea and carries the rollicking tale to its shore. -Charles Rammelkamp, author of Ugler Lee

Bearing the Body of Hector Home is the story of how King Priam of Troy fetched his son's corpse from the grief-striken, vengeance-mad Achilles, the subsequent preparations for and completion of Hector's funeral rites. The collection consists of a series of dramatic monologues from the points of view of Greek and Trojan warriors and also the citizens of Troy, that besieged, doomed city. Poems show us the grieving of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, the cynical takes of Paris and Helen (who caused the War), and the reactions of a gallery of Troy's ordinary subjects: wood cutters, prostitutes, butchers, tavern owners, beggars, pickpockets, tax collectors, security men, deserters-the whole panoply of Trojan society. The collection ends with Hector speaking one last time, bidding the only life he'll ever know goodbye

All Our Fare-Thee-Wells will appeal to dyed-in-the-wool Deadheads, to anyone who ever sang or hummed along to the band's infectious tunes and lyrics, and to anyone who misses or thinks they miss the Sixties.

A poetic journey that transcends nostalgia and explores the residual impact of the the 1960's counterculture in 21st century America.