Although surviving members of the Grateful Dead have formed bands under other names over the years (Other Ones, The Dead, Further), when Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the band broke up and the phenomenon of the endless jamming tours for which they were famous effectively came to an end. So it’s been more than a generation since they ceased to be a music group.  Reviving the memory of the Grateful Dead, Robert Cooperman’s Saved by the Dead is a lovesong to more than the band, but to the fleeting nature of youth as well, his own.

In several of these poems, the narrator encounters kids who weren’t even alive when the Grateful Dead were around and reacts to their bemused expressions. In “Never Trust Anyone Younger Than Thirty” (a play on that old Yippie slogan, never trust anyone over thirty), a bank teller reacts to Cooperman’s look of dismay when she reveals she hasn’t a clue who Jerry Garcia is. “‘Oh yeah,’ she’s trying / to placate a good customer now. / ‘I should’ve known that.’”  In “Music at the Dentist’s Office,” it’s a young assistant who says, “Who are they?” when Cooperman requests Grateful Dead music to accompany his dental surgery.  But at a copy shop in “The Jerry Garcia T-Shirt” another kid sees the t-shirt Cooperman is wearing. “‘The Grateful Dead, right?’ / the kid demands, and I agree. / ‘Awesome,’ he gushes.” Cooperman forgives him the ubiquitous cliché. Something similar happens in “A Near Collision at a Denver Post Office.”

Even more magical is the poem “Professional Courtesy,” from which the chapbook title comes.  Pulling into a truck stop for a sandwich on the way home from a trip, Cooperman and his wife encounter a group of young thugs in an old beater. They rush inside, grab a sandwich and return to their car, fully expecting to find the windshield smashed, the new CD-iPod-player-radio ripped away, their luggage boosted from the trunk.  But instead,

Another humorous poem from the Fillmore East, “The Angels and the Dead,” recounts an encounter with one of the band’s motorcycle-gang bodyguards, “more grease in his hair and beard / than in his hog’s engine and moving parts.”  Terrified that he is about to be beaten to a pulp by the giant, “his chains jangling / like the bridles of an evil knight’s charger,” the youthful Cooperman is relieved when he is allowed to go, waving his admission ticket to the Fillmore East concert.  “Me and my bros will see you there later,” the Angel confides.

And if you’re talking about the Grateful Dead and about youthful shenanigans, naturally you are going to mention drugs. Two humorous poems, “Marijuana Sauce” and “Marijuana Sauce, II,” tell stories of the contemporary Cooperman making a Freudian slip when ordering an eggplant sub with marinara sauce, in a Denver deli, each with different consequences.  And then there’s the poem, “A Friday Night Dinner with My Parents, 1971,” in which the lad slips his old man a joint while they are watching the Knicks on TV. But you’ll have to read that one for yourself to find out what happened.

This is a collection of poems that anybody can enjoy, no matter your age.