Patricia Dobler is one of my favorite Pittsburgh poets—probably my favorite poet, period. She taught at Carlow College and was head of a writing workshop called “Madwomen in the Attic”. She passed away in 2004, you can find her obituary from the Post-Gazette here.
I love her for her poems that never fail to make my eyes prickle, even in the least poetic of circumstances: reading Talking With Strangers while eating cold Chinese food for breakfast, or stranded at an airport.
I first met Dobler when she read her work at an assembly when I was in middle school. I remember her reading “False Teeth,” and realizing that poems can be more than just images to decipher, but stories—with characters, plot, emotion.
Some poems brimming with the ‘burgh influence are:
“On Murray Avenue”
“My Father’s Story”
“Steel Poem, 1912”
“Lessons”
“The Mill in Winter”
“The Persistent Accent”
…
Many of her poems hearken back to the steel mill days of Pittsburgh, and the lives of Hungarian immigrants. Whether that history makes you nostalgic or not, I dare you to read her work without feeling a stirring of familiarity or recognition. As Maxine Kumin writes in the foreward of Talking to Strangers, “Dobler’s view of her origins is free from sentimentality or idealization, but full of feeling. Images, sounds, smells, sparks of connection fly in these poems.”
Some of the poems (“Lessons”, “Steel Poem, 1912”) describe the steel mills as as hell for the workers, but there is pride in these poems instead of the expected despair. “The Mill in Winter” takes the steelworkers’ experience into another direction:
“…They taste metal on their tongues
and yearn toward the mill’s black heart.
To enter, to shut out the bright cold air
is to enter a woman’s body, beautiful
as ashes of roses, a russet jewel,
a hot breath grazing their arms and necks.”
She explores themes of family, girlhood and womanhood, language and identity in her work, and goes beyond the Western Pennsylvania/Ohio experience. I recommend “The Rope” and “Aphasia”.
…
Talking With Strangers
Patricia Dobler
0-299-10834-1
The University of Wisconsin Press
Madison, WI
1986
