ALL OUR FARE-THEE-WELLS by Robert Cooperman

Through spinal surgery, an MRI, even a common cold, Robert Cooperman feels his age in these touching reminiscences of when “my generation believed / its birthright was to stay forever young.” But as Faulkner observed, the past is never dead, it’s not even past.  Blink your eyes and Jerry Garcia is right there in front of our eyes.

–Charles Rammelkamp, author of Catastroika and Ugler Lee

Inspiration winds through the story of the Grateful Dead in fascinating and slippery ways, as Robert Cooperman‘s new collection of poetry illustrates, on so many levels. Just as the band’s music acknowledged its influences and antecedents, Cooperman’s wide-ranging evocation of the band’s achievement is both homage and example of the Dead’s message of the timelessness of artistic truth.

–Nicholas Meriwether, Center for Counterculture Studies

Robert Cooperman‘s wit in these poems is sharp, his vision clear, his nostalgia a proprietary blend that makes this paean to the Grateful Dead especially delicious. The Dead, after all, transformed the calculated routines of the “rock concert” into a free-flowing lucid dream. Those with ears to hear what the music was saying came to enjoy a kind of inner freedom that Vietnam-era America could not otherwise provide. Cooperman’s funny/sad celebration of that freedom is a pure (sometimes impure) pleasure to read.

–Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado (2014-2019