Troy

Just when a spate of new translations of the classics may suggest that nothing more can be done with the antagonisms of Achilles and Agamemnon, or the sorrows of the house of Priam, along comes a book to prove that those subjects are inexhaustible. In fact, the world created by Homer in his book about war and the lives of those who fight it, seems to expand with time, as new versions reflect and refract characters and events so familiar that by now it seems impossible that they are inventions. Troy, by Robert Cooperman, does all of that in a series of poems often in the words of the dead, the dying, and the survivors from that most famous of all conflicts. The strongest, most surprisingly passionate of the poems are spoken by minor characters, the people seldom at the center of history s peak moments. --Rhina P. Espaillat In these poems about the Trojan War, Robert Cooperman has extrapolated details as told by Homer s minor characters--a guard, a prostitute, a court musician, and others. Thus, Cooperman has created sequences of monologues skillfully presented in blank verse or in villanelles. As T. S. Eliot once said, "a man must feel Homer in his bones to begin to absorb the western literary tradition." Cooperman has made Homer his own. He has given us poems that will stand as an independent work beside Homer, not unlike Alexander Pope s Homeric translations. This is the work of a master. --David Middleton, Editor of Original Poetry in English: The Classical Outlook In "For the Fallen at Troy," a series of dramatic monologues written entirely in well-wrought blank verse, Robert Cooperman retells, with stunning relevance, the 3000-year-old story of the Trojan War. Presented as a series of laments for the slain soldiers, the poems create a consistently moving threnody, featuring all the realism and pathos of a contemporary report from the front lines. In The Night of the Trojan Horse, Cooperman has managed to accomplish the nearly impossible recreating with stunning skill the legendary fall of Troy as a series of graceful and supple villanelles. With considerable imagination and prosodic expertise, he reinvents the host of convincing characters, from Odysseus to Oetia (a Trojan kitchen wench) to bring new realism and relevance to the ancient story. This is mythology as you ve never confronted it before. Marilyn L. Taylor, Wisconsin Poet Laureate, 2009 2010 Robert Cooperman is the author of nine previous collections, most recently The Words We Used (Main Street Rag) and A Tiny Ship upon the Sea (March Street Press). In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains won the Colorado Book Award. Cooperman s work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review and Tar River Poetry.
ASIN: 1596611545
VSKU: DBV.1596611545.VG
Condition: Very Good
Author/Artist:Robert Cooperman|Robert Bixby
Binding: Paperback
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: Pages are clean with no markings. May show minor signs of wear or cosmetic defects marks, cuts, bends, or scuffs on the cover, spine, pages, or dust jacket. May have remainder marks on edges.