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WORLD
OVER WATER
Poems by Robert Gibb
Final
volume in a powerful poetic trilogy
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.
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.
“The
strength of American writing today is in such good work.”
—Guy Davenport, author of The Geography of the Imagination
“In the grave, elegiac, and exquisitely
accomplished poems of his new collection, Gibb teaches us
anew how, as one of his poems has it, ‘seeing [is] a
way of inhabiting time.’ . . . [Here are] deeply felt,
formally masterful, and strikingly various poems. It is gratifying
to encounter a poet who possesses such a resonant combination
of intelligence and feeling.”
—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Place: New
and Selected Poems, 1982–2004
Robert Gibb was born and lives in the steel
town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, where many of his poems are
set. Among his many awards are the Camden Poetry Award and
a Pushcart Prize.
March
2007
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 112 pages
$16.95 (s) paper
978-1-55728-836-3 | 1-55728-836-4
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