Hell at Cock's Crow

The reality of life on (and off) the high seas during the Golden Age of Piracy comes alive in this finely crafted collection of swashbuckling sonnets. While each can easily stand alone, together these sonnets form a novel in verse that crests as dramatically an ocean wave. And like any great novel, Hell at Cock’s Crow is impossible to put down. The reader quickly becomes immersed in the colorful and often brutal world Robert Cooperman portrays, eager to learn the fates of characters ranging from the swaggering captain whose piracy has unexpectedly noble origins, the murderous cook, and the reluctant novice marauder to their equally scheming, plundering, lust-filled, and lost female shipmates. Enjoy this salty, imaginative, memorable book.

—Lynda La Rocca, winner of the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest and author of Unbroken

Part a story of crime and justice, part seafaring yarn—complete mayhem—the five and a half dozen sonnets that make up Hell at Cock’s Crow spin a tale worthy of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The morally ambiguous pirate captain, James Raven, a ruthless rapist driven by greed but a would-be Robin Hood to the enslaved, and his even bigger-than-life consort, the “New Christian” Miranda Iglesias on one side, Kathleen Munro and her lover Billy Butcher, for a time wavering members of Raven’s crew, on the other, the tension mounts, and nobody, really, comes out of it unblemished. The rhythm of the Shakespearian sonnets, ABBACDDCEFFEGG, mimics the rolling sea and carries the rollicking tale to its shore.

—Charles Rammelkamp, author of Ugler Lee