Robert Gibb was born and lives in the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, where many of his poems are set. Among his many awards are the Camden Poetry Award and a Pushcart Prize.An Interview with Robert Gibb, Author of World over Water
Q: Does World over Water relate to the books that precede it?Actually, World over Water completes a trilogy begun in The Origins of Evening and The Burning World, in which Homestead figures as a kind of epicenter—social, historical, autobiographical—“a world in which to hold the world” of the poems and their concerns, as MacLeish once wrote regarding Edwin Muir. Taken together the three books comprise an attempt to present the world of the mill town and what it meant to grow up there in the mid-twentieth century, to present material more typically found in the novel.
Q: Does World over Water relate to the books that precede it?Actually, World over Water completes a trilogy begun in The Origins of Evening and The Burning World, in which Homestead figures as a kind of epicenter—social, historical, autobiographical—“a world in which to hold the world” of the poems and their concerns, as MacLeish once wrote regarding Edwin Muir. Taken together the three books comprise an attempt to present the world of the mill town and what it meant to grow up there in the mid-twentieth century, to present material more typically found in the novel.
