About

Life Before Man is Gazebo Books’ poetry imprint, curated by artist and writer Phil Day.

For the better part of thirty years, Phil Day has been involved in the illustrating, designing, printing, binding, and publishing of literature. Over those years, Day has sought simplicity and plainness to create a halting space on the book page for poetry. The result is the beginning of a new poetry series, Life Before Man.

Cleansed of any visual disturbances, each double-page layout is an unobstructed environment for each poem. According to Day, such a setting can better serve the contemplation of a poem to stint the everyday swift reading heightened by recent technologies. A fruitful reading of a poem only occurs when a solemn meeting is found between the reader and the poem. Day’s commitment to the reader raises whether poems are the property of the poet.

To borrow from Rabindranath Tagore:

‘The world is neither your private piece of land nor mine. To take it otherwise would be a rustic approach. Literature, accordingly, is neither my preserve, nor your, nor anybody else’s.’