The Origins of Evening: Poems

by Robert Gibb

Overview

Lyric poems that tell stories in metered lines and stanzas.

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393319644
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/17/1999
Series:	National Poetry Series
Pages:	108
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

Editorial Reviews

The Pittsburgh evoked in many of these generously elegiac narratives recalls the infernal Eden of the waning Industrial age, "a city in the confluence" where the men still walk in groups and drink after their shifts, and a phone call means someone has died. Fueled by memory, Gibb's poems form credible myths in which the poet-protagonist struggles toward redemption among the behemoth-like steel mills and looming mortality. His language, rich with sensory detail, takes up "The dialect coke and pig iron/ Leave upon the tongue" to render lurid cityscapes ("the floor crawling/ With rats,/ their metallic claws,/ Eyes bright as rivets....") that are contrasted with delicate ruminations on the natural world ("The wings almost deciduous,/ Antennae fusty as fronds" he writes of moths). Other poems directly and engagedly address the human condition: "There must be some way to enter/ The world and keep on moving into it,// Leaving the old life, rung by rattles,/ Lying there in the dark." This impulse toward transformation and transcendence pervades this fourth collection (following Fugue for a Late Snow), selected for the National Poetry Series by Eavan Boland, and is familiar enough that not everyone will be easily transported along. But in fusing childhood experience of working life, love and family with current labors and lusts ("Any life where a man/ Cannot go down on his knees,/ Drunk or sober in ecstasy/ Is not worth the pain") these poems make clear their voracity. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

One of the troubles of being a poet in contemporary America, it seems, is the rise of a pervading solemnity; afraid of revealing a fatal weakness by saying too much, or seeming to sing, our poets assure us of their worth by their unceasing seriousness. Gibb's fifth book of poems, the 1997 National Poetry Series-winning Origins of Evening, is unrelentingly downcast: the words night and gray and dark recur like bells striking the hour. Gibb has made a compelling craft out of the deep sadness of the spiritless and dangerous manual labors done in and around the Pittsburgh of his childhood, though the influence of James Wright on his diction and manner is heavy and at times imprisoning. Death, illness, and accident follow each other in mournful procession; even as Gibb describes early sexual feelings in "The Shape of the Goddess in Homestead Park" or "The Adorations," the effect is oddly involuted, as if in apology for the unexpected warmth of the subject. There is a musically gifted, exuberant poet within Gibb, if he were only permitted to sing. For larger collections of contemporary literature.--Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge

Library Journal

This Pittsburgh-based poetþs latest volume, selected by Eavan Boland for 1997's National Poetry Series, wears its working- class credentials on its sleeve. Gibbþs neo-proletarian poemsþarranged on the page in the semblance of formsþmoan and whimper about the lost world of mill workers and the unique glow that defines the industrial Pittsburgh and nearby Homestead. The past weighs so heavily on the poet that he canþt enjoy the weather (þLines in a Slow Thawþ) without thinking of the great lockout of 1892. The only greater burden is the memory of his fatherþs madness (þFathers and Sonsþ), and his cremation (þFire Poemþ), which he inevitably links to the mill fires. þEntering the Ovenþ and þFirst Dayþþtwo of the strongest poems in the volumeþboth record in fiery verse the poetþs own time on the graveyard shift at the plant, and the dizzying heat of working inside the great ovens. Elsewhere Gibbþs subjects exist in solemn relation to his sounds: his celebrations of music are themselves tone-deaf; and his defense of drunkenness (þLetter to a Friendþs Wifeþ) couldnþt be more sober. Memories intrude on the present in Gibbþs somber verse, as drab and gray as the cityscape that haunts him.

Kirkus Reviews