Robert Gibb – författare

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.

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.

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."

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. In Gibb's universe history is an invisible, omnipresent, essential force, as elemental as the air we breathe: ""That this is what it means / To live in history, as though / The past were a difficult music / To keep from your head."" ""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.

Pittsburghese, Robert Gibb’s 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 city’s “consensus things” and “standard archaeologies,” as well as by music—jazz, blues, R&B and gospel—“sweet rebuttal” to the world’s “cold hymns.” Throughout, motifs function like the thorns on the jaggers—Pittsburghese for brambles—whose points engage the reader “one by one.” Other poems elegize the great buildings and working stiffs of the city’s 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 well—habitation and name.

Learning and Using Languages in Ethnographic Research breaks the silence that still surrounds learning a language for ethnographic research and in the process demystifies some of the multilingual aspects of contemporary ethnographic work. It does this by offering a set of engaging and accessible accounts of language learning and use written by ethnographers who are at different stages of their academic career. A key theme is how researchers’ experiences of learning and using other languages in fieldwork contexts relate to wider structures of power, hierarchy and inequality. The volume aims to promote a wider debate among researchers about how they themselves learn and use different languages in their work, and to help future fieldworkers make more informed choices when carrying out ethnographic research using other languages.

Learning and Using Languages in Ethnographic Research breaks the silence that still surrounds learning a language for ethnographic research and in the process demystifies some of the multilingual aspects of contemporary ethnographic work. It does this by offering a set of engaging and accessible accounts of language learning and use written by ethnographers who are at different stages of their academic career. A key theme is how researchers’ experiences of learning and using other languages in fieldwork contexts relate to wider structures of power, hierarchy and inequality. The volume aims to promote a wider debate among researchers about how they themselves learn and use different languages in their work, and to help future fieldworkers make more informed choices when carrying out ethnographic research using other languages.