Pittsburghese

Pittsburghese, Robert Gibbs 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 citys consensus things and standard archaeologies, as well as by musicjazz, blues, R&B and gospelsweet rebuttal to the worlds cold hymns. Throughout, motifs function like the thorns on the jaggersPittsburghese for brambleswhose points engage the reader one by one. Other poems elegize the great buildings and working stiffs of the citys 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 wellhabitation and name.