Among Ruins
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Among Ruins

Robert Gibb

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  2. English
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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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Year
2017
ISBN
9780268102128
III
ā€œBeauties of the Common Toolā€
Photographs by Walker Evans, Fortune, July 1955
Pliers, tin snips, crescent wrench ā€¦
Heā€™s 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 heā€™s lit
The sleek and sculptural metalā€”
That graphite shimmer
Thatā€™s equal parts hardware and art.
After all, there is no part of them
Which does not fit perfectly
With whatever task theyā€™ve been set.
Including the photographsā€™
Where lightā€™s 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 skyā€”an 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
Unmistakableā€”the way the landscape,
Which is light on water, becomes the sky
And Homestead the river-hemmed Venice
Heā€™s 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 Dogeā€™s Palace, stretching back
Along the floodplain. Come daylight
Heā€™ll render their smoke as drifting plumes
Low on the watery horizon, stoked ovens
Howling in a blizzard of pastels ā€¦
Itā€™s 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
Weā€™ve come to recognize as his: a space
Both cavernous and congested. Itā€™s as though
Here in the mills heā€™s 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 canā€™t 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 heā€™s holed up in the library,
Snug inside an alcove on a rainy afternoon,
Light mullioned in the lead-glass windows.
All month heā€™s been burrowing his way
Through Balzac: PĆØre Goriot and Cousin Pons,
The Great Man of the Provinces ā€¦
ā€œOpen pictures of self-indulgence and vice,ā€
Like ones heā€™s found spread all around himā€”
Red-light districts the size of wards,
Gaming houses and pool halls
Where aldermen idle on the public dime.
ā€œWe donā€™t touch on labor conditions,ā€
Heā€™d been warned the first day at the paper,
Or ā€œscandals in high life,ā€ or ā€œthe rich
and religious in a derogatory sense.ā€
But here in Balzacā€™s teeming chapters
Heā€™s glimpsed a mode of approach
Whose manner he might follow
Into every corner of the human moil.
ā€œTo go to the city,ā€ heā€™d once proclaimed,
ā€œis the changeless desire of the mind.ā€
Now that heā€™s done so heā€™s come to believe
That all such desires are ā€œchemic,ā€
Part of the tangle of circumstance
And chance, the very contagion of things
Among which heā€™ll soon loose Carrie Meeber,
The vague entourage of her dreams.
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