Full Description
Pittsburghese, Robert Gibb's latest book of poems, is a work of poignant remembrance, filled with revelations found in the everyday "debris of paradise." The collection is anchored by personal and public histories, the city's "consensus things" and "standard archaeologies," as well as by music—jazz, blues, R&B and gospel—"sweet rebuttal" to the world's "cold hymns." Throughout, motifs function like the thorns on the jaggers—Pittsburghese for brambles—whose points engage the reader "one by one." Other poems elegize the great buildings and working stiffs of the city's industrial past, celebrating its artifacts and artworks, the "necessary mystery" of its trees and wild creatures. Particulars of a world in which dialect is the alembic, the means of expression and the shapes it takes on as well—habitation and name.
Contents
Contents I The Pittsburgh Athletic Association Deskulling the Slag Pots Home Scrap Project: Unemployed Steel Worker, 1987-1988 Musicology Impulse! Last Round: For Rufus Harley Homestead, ca. 1929. Oil on Canvas Worker, Steel Mill The Immanence of 78s On the Removal of the Stephen Foster Statue from Schenley Plaza in Pittsburgh II The Etymologies of Rust Pittsburghese The Play of Memory in Childhood Spaces Phone Booths Telling Time Winter Nights Enlarge the Number of Their Hours Abbott Street Metaphysics Timelines Elegy for the Park Theater III All Hallows Joining the Congregation St. Joseph, Abscondus Voice-Over An End of the Marriage: My Stepmother Buys Twin Beds The Hall Mirror Home Movies Monostiches Varieties of Religious Experience Frances Perkins at the Homestead Post Office IV Bildungsroman The Age of Innocence Park Elementary Summa Theologiae Coal Stove Vandals Deer Season Skinhead Skunk Journal Century Elegies Notes Acknowledgments Series Acknowledgments
