The Long Black Veil

In Petitions for Immortality (2004), Cooperman built a penetrating biography-in-poems on snippets of John Keats' letters and poems. Here, out of the country-music perennial "The Long Black Veil," he fashions a tragedy as unforgiving as one of Euripides'. As in the song, rather than confess to being with his best friend's wife, a man goes to the gallows, and for long after, his lover visits his grave. Cooperman makes the two friends post-Civil War Appalachian mine owners; the adulterous wife a belle from South Carolina; the murdered a mean-spirited banker and the murderer a smallholder ruined by him; the two witnesses habitual drunks; and the judge resentful of the accused's charm. He adds a flawed good witness (the "village idiot"); the hanged man's lovelorn housekeeper, who has been also his casual mistress; and others. Not one of the principals is innocent. Perhaps they don't deserve to suffer, but how could they avoid it? An unforgettably powerful progression of monologues, reminiscent of but better wrought than most of Masters' famed Spoon River Anthology. Ray Olson