Among Ruins

by Robert Gibb

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268102104
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	09/30/2017
Series:	Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry
Edition description:	1
Pages:	98
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Robert Gibb was born in the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Origins of Evening, which was a National Poetry Series winner. He has received numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts grants, seven Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, a Best American Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and The Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, among others. He lives on New Homestead Hill above the Monongahela River.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Pittshurgh Memories (1984) 1

I

On Douglas Cooper's University Center Mural (1995-1996), Carnegie Mellon University 4

Two Views of the River 6

Swimming at Night 8

100-Inch Mill, Special Plate Finishing Facility 10

Pittsburgh Photographs 12

Light Rail 13

Half-Light

1 Driving Home from the Post Office 14

2 "Group Finds Homestead Police Station Is Haunted" 15

3 A Brief History of Photography 17

4 Time Exposure 19

Driving Back to Homestead Park after an Absence of Almost 30 Years 20

II

The Committee on Uniform Nomenclature 24

The Gorsons in the Spanierman Gallery 25

Insomnia 27

Moby-Dick 28

Among Ruins

1 Smokestack, 160-Inch Mill 29

1 Words Written for the Historical Marker Planned for the 12,000-Ton Press 31

The Book of Generations Tucked among the Pages of the Family Bible 32

The Negro Leagues

1 At the Renaming Ceremony 34

2 Keeping Score 36

3 "The Homestead Grays" 37

Donny 38

W. Eugene Smith: Three Photographs 40

III

"Beauties of the Common Tool" 44

Industrial Pittsburgh: Works on Paper 45

Dreiser First Glimpses Sister Carrie in the Stacks of the Carnegie Library 47

Making Pittsburgh Stogies 49

Ahmad Jamal Playing the Piano at the Kay Boy's Club, ca. 1945 50

The Piano 52

Jobs Report 54

The Dinner Pail 57

Historical Portraits

1 John McClure 59

2 Philander C. Knox 60

Newspaper Days: Dreiser in Pittsburgh, 1893-1894 61

IV

Looking through the Entries in an Old Pocket Notebook 66

Children Going Home from School to New Raw Suburbs (1952): Photograph by Cylde Hare 67

Childhood 69

Double Shot 70

View of Toledo 72

Lunar Grammars 74

On Foot 76

The Art of Memory 78

Envoy: University Center Mural (1995-1996), Carnegie Mellon University 80

Notes 81

Editorial Reviews

"Hailing from Homestead, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, the man makes poetry from ore and fire, slag and steel: from boyhood memories of small-city America to the middlish, late years of the twentieth century—the length of time it takes for a prosperous city to go through hell and begin a climb back. This collection is the fourth and final volume of Robert Gibb's study of his old industrial steel town." —ForeWord Reviews

"Once again Robert Gibb has found a gritty, searing, haunting, bluesy lyricism in the heart of industrial America. His poems remember growing up in and around Pittsburgh, where he still lives amid the ruins and art and photos and repurposed structures where memories remain most available, most scalding. Whether dealing with the danger of steel or steam, the inescapable clamor of machinery, or the shenanigans of youth shadowed and bounded by factory life, Gibb's fiercely elegant poems explore how a city, a landscape, a person 'could heal / And yet still be broken.'" —Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory

"Poet Robert Gibb strains to see what once was in his native Homestead in his extraordinary Among Ruins. . . . His neighborhood is a place where 'Pittsburgh looks celestial' and the memories of the locals are as haunted as the police station is said to be. . . . [Gibb] confront[s] the reader with the question of what becomes of our neighborhoods as the city changes. Which is just another way of asking what will become of us." —Pittsburgh Magazine

"I was lucky as editor of Notre Dame Review to have received poems by Robert Gibb one at a time for some years before I actually registered his stature as one of the best poets of his generation. I think I’d rather walk through Homestead, Pennsylvania, with Robert Gibb than through Dublin with Stephen Dedalus. I return to his poems the way I return to the great poets of place: Yeats, Hardy, Williams. I don’t just 'admire' these poems, I love them. I couldn’t be more delighted that ND Press is publishing his new book as a Sandeen Prize winner. I knew Ernest Sandeen for many years. This is a book that he too would have celebrated. " —John Matthias, emeritus, University of Notre Dame

“What makes Among Ruins a success isn’t experimentation or shocking confessionalism, but rather a reliance on clear-sighted memory . . . the distinctly wrought images carry a collection that leans on accurate representation . . . [as] he relies on precise language, a signature invoking a supple musicality.” —Pittsburgh City Paper

From the Publisher

"'Pittsburgh looks celestial, hovering in mid-air,' Robert Gibb writes in one of the translucent poems that make up Among Ruins. In this magisterial book, Gibb makes his native Pittsburgh native ground, art object, and myth. Whether recalling a gray childhood, jobs he once worked, or meditating on the photographs of W. Eugene Smith or Clyde Hare, Gibb gives us poems that can both tell a story and stop us in our tracks at an unexpected insight. 'This is the house my memory has kept for me,' one poem says, and we want to follow those words through each room of that large and varied house."

Al Maginnes

"The one-time steelworker skillfully uses Among Ruins’ 81 pages to round out his four-volume Homestead Works cycle, with its focus on the industrial past of the poet’s hometown that informs this region’s history, as well. No self-promoter, Gibb has been quietly crafting sharp-eyed work for decades. . . . Gibb juxtaposes his and the area’s past in relevant, beautifully rendered ways using a wide range of artists and photographers as a lens to situate the reader among the rubble of things past."

Pittsburgh City Paper

"Poet Robert Gibb strains to see what once was in his native Homestead in his extraordinary Among Ruins. . . . His neighborhood is a place where 'Pittsburgh looks celestial' and the memories of the locals are as haunted as the police station is said to be. . . . [Gibb] confront[s] the reader with the question of what becomes of our neighborhoods as the city changes. Which is just another way of asking what will become of us."

Pittsburgh Magazine

"Once again Robert Gibb has found a gritty, searing, haunting, bluesy lyricism in the heart of industrial America. His poems remember growing up in and around Pittsburgh where he still lives amid the ruins and art and photos and repurposed structures where memories remain most available, most scalding. Whether dealing with the danger of steel or steam, the inescapable clamor of machinery, or the shenanigans of youth shadowed and bounded by factory life, Gibb's fiercely elegant poems explore how a city, a landscape, a person 'could / heal and yet still be broken.'"

Floyd Skloot

"Hailing from Homestead, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, the man makes poetry from ore and fire, slag and steel: from boyhood memories of small-city America to the middlish, late years of the twentieth century—the length of time it takes for a prosperous city to go through hell and begin a climb back. This collection is the fourth and final volume of Robert Gibb's study of his old industrial steel town."

ForeWord Reviews

"I was lucky as editor of Notre Dame Review to have received poems by Robert Gibb one at a time for some years before I actually registered his stature as one of the best poets of his generation. I think I’d rather walk through Homestead, Pennsylvania, with Robert Gibb than through Dublin with Stephen Dedalus. I return to his poems the way I return to the great poets of place: Yeats, Hardy, Williams. I don’t just 'admire' these poems, I love them. I couldn’t be more delighted that ND Press is publishing his new book as a Sandeen Prize winner. I knew Ernest Sandeen for many years. This is a book that he too would have celebrated. "

John Matthias