Publisher's Synopsis
Poet John Vance Gilbert relishes language. Its sound and ambiguity have the power to transform the act of noticing into structures of awareness. By "noticing" the poet offers a structure fixed in time. Its sole purpose is to be. As the poet Archibald MacLeish noted:
"A poem should not mean But be."
This volume of poems represents writings from three different periods, actually, three books in one. The first period (I Give You My Words) is from the late 1950s when the poet was in his teens. The second period (Lost Works) is from the 1970s, when the poet mistakenly left a brown bag of poems on the subway as he left the train, and the third period (Dimensions of Grandeur) is from the 2020s, written in Pershing Square, a restaurant directly across from Grand Central Terminal.
