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...

In 1999 Robert Gibb published The Origins of Evening, selected by Eavan Boland for W. W. Norton as that yearas National Poetry Series selection. Nearly five years later he published The Burning World with the University of Arkansas Press, and Stanley Plumley described the aevolving, working lyric narrative [that was] underway.a Indeed, in Gibbas 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 worldaa world of steel mills, fire-strewn rivers,...

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...