Robert Gibb

Pittsburghese, Robert Gibb’s latest book of poems, is a work of poignant remembrance, filled with revelations found in the everyday “debris of paradise.” The collection is anchored by personal and public histories, the city’s “consensus things” and “standard archaeologies,” as well as by music—jazz, blues, R&B and gospel—“sweet rebuttal” to the world’s “cold hymns.” Throughout, motifs function like the thorns on the jaggers—Pittsburghese for brambles—whose points engage the reader “one by one.” Other poems elegize the great buildings and working stiffs of the city’s industrial past, celebrating its artifacts and artworks, the “necessary mystery” of its trees and wild creatures. Particulars of a world in which dialect is the alembic, the means of expression and the shapes it takes on as well—habitation and name.

In SIGHTLINES, Robert Gibb takes the usual practice of Ekphrasis-the lyric recasting of artworks into words-and extends it across a range of visual material, including poems about artists, parallel narratives triggered by their works, and poems in which subject matter (clouds, birds, etc.) is a kind of identifying brand. There are first-person poems as well, taking in the poet's own history as art student and painter. "Don't look. See," the book tells us-sightlines being both the vantages and the lines of the poems themselves.

Among Ruins is the final volume of Homestead Works, a collection of four books of poetry that explore the industrial past and legacy of the old steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and, by extension, Pittsburgh.

Among Ruins is the final volume of Homestead Works, a collection of four books of poetry that explore the industrial past and legacy of the old steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and, by extension, Pittsburgh.

“One of the best poets now writing in America.” —Notre Dame Review “The strength of American writing today is in such good work.” —Guy Davenport, author of The Geography of the Imagination The poems in The Empty Loom weave together a figure—lover, wife, mother, muse—which takes shape before us, fully present in what Samuel Beckett calls “the time of the body.” Set firmly within the resonance of the natural world and glimpsed in paintings, fabrics, snatches of song, the poems revolve around her, fulfilling their “injunction to savor / The folds of light which fall / On the perishable world.” Now joyful, now elegiac in tone, Gibb’s love and its loss are rendered in the quiet elegance of image and line characteristic of his poems, their focus shifting like the sun as it tracks its passage across a room, a life.

In Gibb's second Autumn House Poetry collection, he finds sublime music in everyday city life. He offers a roadmap to hear the music of life and nature within the context of an industrial setting.

In 1999, Robert Gibb published ""The Origins of Evening"", selected by Eavan Boland for W. W. Norton as that year's ""National Poetry Series"" selection. Nearly five years later, he published ""The Burning World"" with the University of Arkansas Press, and Stanley Plumley described the ""evolving, working lyric narrative [that was] underway."" Indeed, in Gibb's new collection, ""World over Water"", this evolving, lyric narrative finds its conclusion in the third volume of his Pittsburgh trilogy. The new collection continues to explore the lost industrial world - a world of steel mills, fire-strewn rivers, and working-class lives, in which place and family stand as metaphors for each other. The poems reach back to the late nineteenth century in a mixture of elegy and chronicle, genealogy and history, reclaiming the past and its witnesses. In Gibb's universe history is an invisible, omnipresent, essential force, as elemental as the air we breathe: ""That this is what it means / To live in history, as though / The past were a difficult music / To keep from your head."" ""World Over Water"" is not a remembrance of what was but an act of imagination that wills the past alive in all its savage beauty.

Homestead, Pa.: “The Former Steel Capital of the World.” In this elegant and arresting book of poems, Robert Gibb deftly renders a world of molten steel and red-hot ingots, of lives lived according to the factory whistle, and of a grandfather who “plunged / Like an angel, his body broken / And on fire.” Passing through fire, this book makes plain, is one of the necessary conditions of witness. These lyrical and devastatingly beautiful poems are powerful in both their ability to evoke the past and in the poignancy of the losses they catalog, beginning with heartbreaking personal losses and extending into communal ones. Indeed, a book so freighted with loss and sadness might have deteriorated into maudlin nostalgia in lesser hands. But Gibb has elevated The Burning World to the level of tragedy, with all the dignity and severity that that word calls forth.

Winner of the 1997 National Poetry Series, judged and selected by Eavan Boland. Of the collection, Eavan Boland wrote: "The deft language and lyric intent of these poems serve one purpose: slowly and exactly they expose the dark, silvery images of a lost world. Here is Pittsburgh at twilight, in the old dusk of the steel mills. Here is a drug store, the Monongahela river, the trolleys and the carbarns. And here is memory at its most scalding, intense, and rigorous. This world is never regretted, never mourned for. There is no elegy here because not a single detail in this remarkable landscape has ceased to exist. It is all there, all alive, all available to language. This is a rare and forceful book of poems."