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You’d imagine that a poet who grew up in Homestead during steel’s heyday would write about mills and soot, shift workers and blast furnaces. And indeed, Rober Gibb has done so, wonderfully well, as in his “Pittsburgh” trilogy that concluded with 2007’s World Over Water.
But Gibb has long been much more than a Poet Who Worked in a Mill. Exhibit A is What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979-1993, new on local imprint Autumn House Press.
The collection, edited by Rebecca Clever, is notable for running in reverse chronology. It begins with picks from 1993’s Fugue for a Late Snow and ends with some from 1983’s The Names of Earth in Summer, plus 14 uncollected poems. Mostly, though, it makes a case for Gibb — who’s launching a series of tandem readings at local libraries with McKeesport-born author John Hoerr — as an exemplary poet of the natural world.
By that I mean not that Gibb’s always in the woods, but rather that flora and fauna and landscapes (wild or cultivated) are his especial touchstones. So are jazz, carpentry, Melville and baseball. But in this collection, it’s nature he returns to most: watching a “Blue Heron”; “Holding My Son Andrew Up to the Moon”; and telling one on himself, about a marvelous creature that wasn’t (“Brown Bat”).
To be sure, Gibb’s narrators might also observe the world from inside a Bethlehem dive bar. And the poet’s sense of wonder on a winter solstice is rather domesticated. Sitting in the cold, he observes “water / Marled thick as quartz / In the collar / of the pipe.”
But Gibb is a poet who engages as well as watches. In “Fugue for a Late Snow,” you feel him tramping through the powder, finding too-early robins “[l]ying out along the roads, bodies / Like small dead fires, stamped flat / And scattered.” When his “Muskellunge” narrator comes across the body of this giant fish — “A whole third of them head, there’s / no mistaking what laws they live by” — he axes its head, a memento mori.
Another narrator hunts. In “[t]he cold, explicit, November air,” Gibb writes in “Dressing Pheasants,” he has “lifted up the lolling body and known it / Like few others in my life …”
Gibb is as attentive to light as the painters he references (Courbet, Munch). When he visits Sutter’s grave (“Country Churchyards”), he repurposes “gold rush” to mean pollen in sunshine. In “Gooseberries,” there appear “twilights / Immense and cold as metal, empty / Except for the few dark flames of / Flapping birds …”
Presented in chronological reverse, Gibb’s poems become syntactically simpler, less densely expressed, but remain rewarding. He is always looking for paths from nature to culture, and back. In a section of the older poem “Whale Song” that’s set in a natural-history museum, he writes, “If there were a body / To God it would be like this — / Resplendent, / With no need of hands.”
Robert Gibb reads with John Hoerr 6 p.m. Mon., Oct. 19 (South Side Carnegie Library, 412-431-0505); 7 p.m. Tue., Oct. 20 (Whitehall Public Library, 412-882-6622); and 7 p.m. Thu., Oct. 22 (Braddock Carnegie Library, 412-351-5356). All readings are free.
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2009.
BEST CHOICE : EARLY DEPARTURES FOR THE SUN
Early Departures for the Sun, is a riveting book that chronicles the prevailing violence, which permeates our lives and homes. America has become so obsessed with violence that little children are learning to kill before they understand the English alphabet. Many people search for a spiritual answer, only to hope that their faiths would lead them to see their love ones who were violently removed from their lives. Violence also reared its ugly head in today’s foster care and adopted homes. In which the children that reside there are the victims of a terrible procedure that terminates parent’s parental rights by the thousands from data collected by corrupt Child Protective Service workers. America judicial system has failed our children and America cannot survive by giving its children an option of life in prison or death from gun violence. Early Departures for the Sun, gives honest reflections of how violence destroys the hearts and souls of people in marriages and relationships. The court dockets are replete with court dates from women and men who have filed personal protection orders against people who they once loved but now need protection from due to their violent and threatening behavior.
The tragic events of today have impelled the author Raymond Sturgis to include poems that our hearts want to ask but our lifestyles actuate. Like the poems, “Where Is God? His Face, His Eyes, His Rage and Bullets In the Morning, that familiarize with unforgettable painful experiences. Author Raymond Sturgis also share his experiences of growing up and currently residing in Detroit, Michigan. The author conveys the sadness and despair of over 400 parents that have lost children to gun violence, robbing toddlers and infants of a chance of living a fulfilled life. The senseless act of violence is mainly from ex boyfriends, ex husbands or teenage cowards that found answers to their problems by shooting in homes and schools without remorse. Early Departures for the Sun gives a realistic view of how violent our world has become, but a more kinder and spiritual view of love ones taking the Early Departure to the Sun right outside heaven’s door. The author Raymond Sturgis understand that his book may intensify people anger towards the people that have killed their parents, brothers, sisters, friends or children. However, he reminds them in his chapter, “Is Violence All we Know?” that violence may lead to death, but death shall not be studied as a means to solve conflicts and misunderstandings. Early Departures for the Sun is a CALL OUT book, so that everyone can enlist in the war against violence, as well as an encouragement so we all can stand with those whom may have lost someone to violence. The book, Early Departures for the Sun is available through Amazon.com, http://www.bubooksontheweb.com, Borders, Walden Books, and hundreds of media outlets around the world.
Paperback: 390 pages
Publisher: Infinity Publishing (August 21, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0741453177