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Among Ruins
Robert Gibb
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eBook - ePub
Among Ruins
Robert Gibb
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About This Book
Among Ruins is the final volume of Homestead Works, a collection of four books of poetry that explore the industrial past and legacy of the old steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and, by extension, Pittsburgh.
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Topic
LiteratureSubtopic
American PoetryIII
āBeauties of the Common Toolā
Photographs by Walker Evans, Fortune, July 1955
Pliers, tin snips, crescent wrench ā¦
Heās centered each one in the field
Of his undivided attention,
Where it seems to float suspended
In a world of mists, inviting the hand
To test its heft and balance,
The eye to admire the way heās lit
The sleek and sculptural metalā
That graphite shimmer
Thatās equal parts hardware and art.
After all, there is no part of them
Which does not fit perfectly
With whatever task theyāve been set.
Including the photographsā
Where lightās been made to coalesce
In each dense, mist-bound shape,
Forged steel alluring as a magnet,
The planet of its page.
Industrial Pittsburgh: Works on Paper
1. Whistler on the Smithfield Street Bridge
Winter twilight, the last flights of pigeons
Wheeling home above the river,
Wisps of cirrus like scratches in glass.
Again tonight the great buildings have turned
Transparent, their weightless sides
The same gray as the skyāan equilibrium
He knows will soon give way to the darkness
Massing in their shapes, to mill smoke
And gas lamps erasing the terraced stars.
But for now, from the bow of the bridge,
Scumblings of mist on the river,
Pittsburgh looks celestial, hovering in midair,
The way water does in the distance
Above whatever mirror might cast it there.
2. Turner in Homestead
Unmistakableāthe way the landscape,
Which is light on water, becomes the sky
And Homestead the river-hemmed Venice
Heās painted keelmen floating coal to at night,
The red flecks of their deck lamps
Daubed within the loose notational haze.
Those flat black shadows are steel mills,
Vast as the Dogeās Palace, stretching back
Along the floodplain. Come daylight
Heāll render their smoke as drifting plumes
Low on the watery horizon, stoked ovens
Howling in a blizzard of pastels ā¦
Itās there in his sketches, that pairing of light
With coal fires burning on the river at night.
3. Piranesi Discovers Open Hearth #5
Conte crayons and sketchpads, their pages
Packed with the soot-black shadows
Cast by catwalks, chimneys, scaffoldsā
All in that welter of piled-up perspectives
Weāve come to recognize as his: a space
Both cavernous and congested. Itās as though
Here in the mills heās entered one of his own
Imaginary prisons, their fantastic maze
Of chambers no less starved for light.
Hoist chains and rafters. The train tracks
And carriages of the overhead cranes, slabs
Stacked by them to a tenement height.
Yet in here everything is under, a necropolis
Right from his dreams. He canāt get over it.
Dreiser First Glimpses Sister Carrie in the Stacks of the Carnegie Library
Pittsburgh, 1893
Barely weeks at his dream job, working
A beat, and heās holed up in the library,
Snug inside an alcove on a rainy afternoon,
Light mullioned in the lead-glass windows.
All month heās been burrowing his way
Through Balzac: PĆØre Goriot and Cousin Pons,
The Great Man of the Provinces ā¦
āOpen pictures of self-indulgence and vice,ā
Like ones heās found spread all around himā
Red-light districts the size of wards,
Gaming houses and pool halls
Where aldermen idle on the public dime.
āWe donāt touch on labor conditions,ā
Heād been warned the first day at the paper,
Or āscandals in high life,ā or āthe rich
and religious in a derogatory sense.ā
But here in Balzacās teeming chapters
Heās glimpsed a mode of approach
Whose manner he might follow
Into every corner of the human moil.
āTo go to the city,ā heād once proclaimed,
āis the changeless desire of the mind.ā
Now that heās done so heās come to believe
That all such desires are āchemic,ā
Part of the tangle of circumstance
And chance, the very contagion of things
Among which heāll soon loose Carrie Meeber,
The vague entourage of her dreams.
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