An Oar for Odysseus by Robert Cooperman
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“An Oar for Odysseus”
Poetry
Kelsay Books, 2025
$22.00, 136 pages
979-8-90146-705-3

Like Iraq war veteran and Jungian psychotherapist Adam Magers’s self-help book, Odysseus & the Oar, written for war veterans who are dealing with the trauma of homecoming after enduring slaughter and destruction, Robert Cooperman’s latest poetry collection likewise deals with a warrior with PTSD and his problematic homecoming, and the oar is again a powerful symbol of a final reckoning.

But whereas Magers’s book is meant to help veterans and their supporters with the healing and transformation process after their military service and experience of war through psychological methods, An Oar for Odysseus tells the story of Odysseus’ homecoming as yet another exile. “My oar,” he rasps to Axia in the collection’s penultimate poem, “Odysseus Lies Dying,” the Trojan woman with whom Odysseus has been living since being banished from Ithaca by his son Telemachus, “to row across Styx if Charon refuses my coin.” His last grim little joke.  Both Magers and Cooperman agree that the deepest war wounds are those to the soul, but in Cooperman’s yarn, redemption may be as elusive as ever.

An Oar for Odysseus follows Robert Cooperman’s previous collection, The Ghosts and Bones of Troy, in which Odysseus kills a harmless boy the night the Greeks sack Troy, and he is haunted by it, restless and guilt-ridden, suffering classic PTSD symptoms, drinking too much, upsetting his loyal wife Penelope and their son Telemachus with his behavior and attitude, even contemplating suicide. Telemachus carries his own resentments, seemingly Oedipal, which motivate his behavior as well.

Exasperated, as An Oar for Odysseus opens,Telemachus is sending his father away with a couple of assassins (“it’s my time to rule, not that drunk old man,” he self-righteously justifies his actions to himself). But of course, the plan doesn’t work. He’s panicked, and Polynides, his mother Penelope’s suitor, goes off to find Odysseus after the skiff he was sent away in with the two assassins washes up on shore. 

Odysseus had gone back to Troy to atone for killing the child and had since joined Axia and her son Miletes on an island haven. In “Miletes Thinks of His Mother and Odysseus,” Miletes remembers post-war Troy after the Greeks had destroyed it and left everyone for dead:

Somehow I got her into an old skiff
then drifted to Troy’s bone-filled battlefield.
There, Odysseus found us, bound Mother’s wounds,
told of the war fought there. When Mother healed,
he asked if we wished to accompany him.

The three of them settle in their paradisiacal island, Odysseus teaching Miletes how to hunt, Axia tentatively in love, their lives harmonious. But even as they are living an ideal life, Miletes sees Polyinides’ ships approaching. In “Odysseus Sees the Ships” Cooperman foreshadows the upending of Odysseus’ fragile idyll:

I’m content with Axia and Miletes.
They healed my soul, so troubled after killing
that boy when I leapt from the Wooden Horse,
I’d have killed myself without mercy.

Indeed, Odysseus professes his soul cured by his new “family,” only to anticipate its destruction once again when they see the delegation from Ithaca approach.

As in his previous collections concerning the ancient Greek heroes, Cooperman describes events from multiple perspectives, in the voices of a variety of characters. We “overhear” Telemachus and Penelope as they consider Odysseus’ behavior and character. We are privy to Odysseus’ thoughts as well. As the Greeks come to spoil their utopian wonderland, Miletes and Axia express their fears, and the Greeks who have come to find Odysseus – Polynides, Boreas, Neseis among them – likewise have points-of-view, conspiring as the story unfolds.

But to make a long story short, the Greeks leave without Odysseus, returning to Ithaca, and Odysseus and his companions think it prudent to flee to yet another island. How this all plays out on Ithaca and for the three companions in their new village in their new island home are some of Robert Cooperman’s story-telling charms in An Oar for Odysseus.

When, at the very end, Odysseus ends up in Hades with nothing but time to spin his own yarns to his former warrior companions – Achilles, Ajax, Menelaus, Patroclus and the rest – the reader is left to ponder the wounds that still fester in the souls of the warriors. Is there healing in story-telling?  Is healing even possible? Perhaps, a la Magers, it can be a tool of recovery. But read An Oar for Odysseus and decide for yourself.