Book Review: A Killing Fever by Robert Cooperman

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; 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.

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Article Author: Hugh Ruppersburg

Hugh Ruppersburg lives and works in Athens, Georgia.

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