An Oar for Odysseus (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798901467053)

In An Oar for Odysseus, Robert Cooperman mines the Homeric epics for more gold. Finally back home in Ithaca from the Trojan War, his country and his family in shambles, Odysseus embarks upon another voyage. Only this time, his son, Telemachus, and his wife, Penelope, the Jocasta to her son's would-be Oedipus, are behind Odysseus' exile. Where he finally ends up and the odyssey he undertakes are the ingots of Cooperman's vivid imagination. As Penelope muses in her final poem in An Oar for Odysseus, "his fate is a constant quest."

In An Oar for Odysseus, Robert Cooperman's blazing, 21st Century poetic rendering of the Greek myth post-nostros, the poems carry the reader along with propulsive force - from Telemachus exiling his PTSD-laden father, to Odysseus' final coda in Hades. Throughout the narrative, we encounter first-person accounts from characters such as his wife, Penelope (who calls her husband "a foaming stranger with Odysseus' aged face") to Axia and Miletes, individuals who not only become his surrogate family but also represent his unanticipated opportunity for redemption. Through it all, with the reader swept along for the ride, Cooperman's Odysseus is a desperate man on a new and final journey - one of reclamation - becoming a sympathetic figure for the ages. As he lay dying, he can finally admit that "better a small / life well-lived" than the alternative. Adventure-packed, but grounded in human, tender feelings, An Oar for Odysseus is a beautiful book.

-Jon Ballard, author, Possible Lives and Where It Hurts