The Burning World: Poems

The Burning World: Poems

by Robert Gibb
The Burning World: Poems

The Burning World: Poems

by Robert Gibb

Paperback(New Edition)

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781557287656
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication date: 07/01/2004
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 76
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Robert Gibb was born in the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of five previous books of poetry: The Origins of Evening (1998), which was a National Poetry Series winner (selected by Eavan Boland); Late Snow (1993); Momentary Days (1989); The Winter House (1984); and The Names of the Earth in Summer (1983). His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts grant, four Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, a Pushcart Prize, the Wildwood Poetry Prize, and the Devil’s Millhopper Chapbook Prize. He currently lives on New Homestead Hill above the Monongahela River.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsv
I
Pictures at an Exhibition5
In the Emergency Room8
Brain Coral10
A Poem Written for the Aviary at a Time of Its Possible Closing12
Ash and Stone14
The Jars21
Sifting through the Remains23
Lost Waters26
Salvation Army28
The Employments of Time in Homestead30
A Memorium for the Syria Mosque Razed to Make Space for Parking35
Martha in Darkness36
II
Magnetic North41
Lewis Hine: Two Photographs48
Steel Engravings50
Quatrains for a Christmas Bear52
For the Inmate Pedro Velazquez, Who Restored a Wooden Tricycle for Our Youngest Son's Christmas54
Phipps Conservatory56
First Visit to My Mother's Grave, North Side Catholic Cemetery58
Cigar: An Ode60
Folding the Fox63
The Burning World64
Rust Belt71
Homestead Park72
Notes75

What People are Saying About This

Stanley Plumly

Gibb's new collection continues the memory work of the burning world he has a career of building-a world of steel mills and urban displacement, hard labor and its heartbreak. This is the poet's most personal book, filled with family elegy, formal eloquence, and the embrace of those small, luminous, fire-tested things worth saving. Homestead, not far from Pittsburgh, PA, is, as always, the setting, as if an evolving, working lyric narrative were underway, which there is.

Maxine Kumin

A redeeming lyricism informs this scrupulously crafted, fiercely elegiac collection. Not since Philip Levine have we had a working-class stiff write such moving poems.

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