The Origins of Evening: Poems (The National Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Gibb, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393046443 ISBN 13: 9780393046441

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1998

Synopsis

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."

About this title

About the Author

Robert Gibb lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His previous volumes include The Winter House, Fugue for a Late Snow, and Momentary Days, which won the Camden Poetry Award. His poetry has been published in Esquire, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and other magazines.

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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This Pittsburgh-based poets latest volume, selected by Eavan Boland for 1997's National Poetry Series, wears its working- class credentials on its sleeve. Gibbs neo-proletarian poemsarranged on the page in the semblance of formsmoan 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 cant enjoy the weather (Lines in a Slow Thaw) without thinking of the great lockout of 1892. The only greater burden is the memory of his fathers madness (Fathers and Sons), and his cremation (Fire Poem), which he inevitably links to the mill fires. Entering the Oven and First Daytwo of the strongest poems in the volumeboth record in fiery verse the poets own time on the graveyard shift at the plant, and the dizzying heat of working inside the great ovens. Elsewhere Gibbs subjects exist in solemn relation to his sounds: his celebrations of music are themselves tone-deaf; and his defense of drunkenness (Letter to a Friends Wife) couldnt be more sober. Memories intrude on the present in Gibbs somber verse, as drab and gray as the cityscape that haunts him. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393046443
• ISBN 13: 9780393046441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 107