Pictures of the Gone World

San Francisco, CA: The City Lights Pocket Bookshop. Very Good+. 1955. 1st Edition; 1st Printing. Paperback. 087286040X . The first book in the Pocket Poets Series published by The City Lights Pocket Bookshop. This first edition was limited to 500 unnumbered copies. This is a small paperback book with heavy black cardstock covers and a yellow wraparound label. This book is in Very Good+ condition and was issued without a dust jacket. The book and its contents are in clean, bright condition. The yellow label has noticeable ground-in dirt and there is a grease-pencil mark (partly erased) as well. The text pages are clean and bright with the exception of one word underlined in blue ink on page 4. "Ferlinghetti penned much of his early poetry in the vein of T. S. Eliot. Ferlinghetti told poet and critic Jack Foley, "Everything I wrote sounded just like him." Yet, even in his poems inspired by Eliot such as Ferlinghetti's "Constantly Risking Absurdity," Ferlinghetti is ever the populist as he compares the poet first to a trapeze artist in a circus and then to a "little charleychaplin man." Critics have noted that Ferlinghetti's poetry often takes on a highly visual dimension as befits this poet who was also a painter. As the poet and critic Jack Foley states, Ferlinghetti's poems "tell little stories, make 'pictures'." Ferlinghetti as a poet paints with his words pictures full of color capturing the average American experience as seen in his poem "In Golden Gate Park that Day: "In Golden Gate Park that day/ a man and his wife were coming along/ ... He was wearing green suspenders ... While his wife was carrying a bunch of grapes." " (from Wikipedia) .