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Homestead, Pa.: “The Former Steel Capital of the World.” In this elegant and arresting book of poems, Robert Gibb deftly renders a world of molten steel and red-hot ingots, of lives lived according to the factory whistle, and of a grandfather who “plunged / Like an angel, his body broken / And on fire.” Passing through fire, this book makes plain, is one of the necessary conditions of witness.

These lyrical and devastatingly beautiful poems are powerful in both their ability to evoke the past and in the poignancy of the losses they catalog, beginning with heartbreaking personal losses and extending into communal ones. Indeed, a book so freighted with loss and sadness might have deteriorated into maudlin nostalgia in lesser hands. But Gibb has elevated The Burning World to the level of tragedy, with all the dignity and severity that that word calls forth.

The poems in The Empty Loom weave together a figure--lover, wife, mother, muse--which takes shape before us, fully present in what Samuel Beckett calls "the time of the body." Set firmly within the resonance of the natural world and glimpsed in paintings, fabrics, snatches of song, the poems revolve around her, fulfilling their "injunction to savor / The folds of light which fall / On the perishable world." Now joyful, now elegiac in tone, Gibb's love and its loss are rendered in the quiet elegance of image and line characteristic of his poems, their focus shifting like the sun as it tracks its passage across a room, a life.

In 1999 Robert Gibb published The Origins of Evening, selected by Eavan Boland for W. W. Norton as that year’s National Poetry Series selection. Nearly five years later he published The Burning World with the University of Arkansas Press, and Stanley Plumley described the “evolving, working lyric narrative [that was] underway.” Indeed, in Gibb’s new collection, World over Water, this evolving, lyric narrative finds its conclusion in the third volume of his Pittsburgh trilogy. The new collection continues to explore the lost industrial world—a world of steel mills, fire-strewn rivers, and working-class lives, in which place and family stand as metaphors for each other. The poems reach back to the late nineteenth century in a mixture of elegy and chronicle, genealogy and history, reclaiming the past and its witnesses. World over Water is not a remembrance of what was but an act of imagination that wills the past alive in all its savage beauty.