In A Dream of The Northwest Passage, Bob Cooperman does what only he is capable of doing--creating an exciting narrative adventure out of a series of linked free-verse poems with all the music and yearning of lines in a Shakespearian play. Cooperman is a master of the verse novel, perhaps our only contemporary master of this form. --Michael Salcman, author of The Clock Made of Confetti, nominated for the Poet’s Prize and finalist for the Towson University Prize for Literature
To those who diss contemporary narrative poetry: Abandon your prejudice, all ye who enter A Dream of the Northwest Passage. The 56 poems hang from a well-known story: the ill-fated last voyage of explorer Henry Hudson and his son, John. In Cooperman’s telling, John is rescued by Auliqoq—an Inuit exiled for the murder of his wife and her lover—and a native community that takes him in. But the flesh of the story is the richly imagined voices of John, Auliqoq, and Henry. The marooned crew, “grumbling buggers” all, “whinging” in their misery as they fight for survival aboard a “shallop”; Aliqoq makes the “spilled Berry Moon” and the “Egg Moon” seem as immediate as the white “ice giants,” with “their dreadful teeth.” Cooperman’s characters become powerfully believable. His characters’ voices move sturdily in three-to-five stress lines, sturdy yet fluid, tough yet dignified, and its imagery bespeaks a powerful poetic imagination capable of lighting up a dimmed past. This vibrant tale of desperation and degeneration, revenge and redemption, will thrill history lovers, story-lovers, poetry-lovers. —Clarinda Harriss, Faculty Adviser, Grub Street, Editor/Director, BrickHouse Books, Inc.
Robert Cooperman is the author of seven previous collections, most recently The Long Black Veil (Higganum Hill Books) and A Killing Fever (Ghost Road Press). Cooperman’s In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Books) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. Cooperman lives in Denver with wife, Beth.