Overview

A small town is a world. The world, broken up in the kaleidoscope of experience, is a small town. Western Pennsylvania a half-century ago is the starting-point for Arthur Erbe's Impressions, in which he traces, in delicate and concise narratives, a year in the life of a boy, a handyman, and an elderly woman with failing memory. What they perceive of one another is not what they are. This opening cycle, ""The Seasons: Four Trilogies,"" opens up in ""Personal Impressions"" to a broader glimpse of the town's residents and the incidents in their lives. In these small and modest lives, dreams and urges simmer, and ""Neighborhood Impressions"" goes deeper still to confront change and inner struggle. If all these poems seem to form a closed system, a terrarium of souls, a snow-globe ending at the town line, the poet employs this as a figured ground, an overture, to his own escape to a wider world, of art, of lived centuries on another continent. Suddenly, Erbe speaks of, and sometimes in the voices of Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, the painters Breughel, Vermeer, Degas, Cassatt, Van Gogh, and Wyeth. In these ""Historical Impressions,"" the boy from the obscure small town is now in the company of an unknown Provencal poet, the Russian Anton Chekhov and America's Thoreau and Willa Cather. He tours Ireland, the Alps, and Picardy in France. And just as the small world opens up into a larger one, sometimes the larger world comes home, as Erbe recounts how the world-famed actress Eleanora Duse came to Pittsburgh for her last bow.

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