[Tread the Dark] contains some of the best work of [David Ignatow's] that I have seen. Ignatow … is contemptuous of "perfect form": in Poem 88 he mocks, in one of his few explicitly angry statements, the American poetry establishment which at one time made a virtue of well-groomed, fastidiously-wrought incapacity. It is hardly a revelation to say that Ignatow writes in the tradition of Whitman and Williams, and that he has developed a conversational, understated tone that would make a poem of his immediately recognizable anywhere. Yet in Tread the Dark, in the parable-like prose poems especially, there is a quizzical, highly intellectual consciousness at work, an intelligence that hides itself, paradoxically, behind what might be called the "simple speech" of everyday life. Ignatow's art isn't simple, however, any more than Williams's was. One encounters in their poetry the casual ease of common speech employed to record distinctly uncommon states of mind and the effect, when most successful, is far more striking than a well-wrought infinitely self-conscious poem of Wallace Stevens's…. Ignatow's poems in Tread the Dark seem to be almost exclusively about poetry, even when they deal, metaphorically with images far removed from the poetic consciousness….

Ignatow always reads like a confessional poet, which is one of the disguises he takes; he sounds defiantly personal, yet the reader comes away with almost no knowledge of his personal life. His vision is austere, as well as ironic and frequently self-deprecatory: you may think he is speaking of Ignatow, but how can he speak of Ignatow since his very identity is a mystery to him? There are many "I's" in Tread the Dark and they are all convincing….

[The] book is constructed like a journal: one has the impression of reading the poet's thoughts as they move, and change, from day to day. Images of death, pain, and despair appear to be transformed gradually into images of acceptance, even pleasure, but the transformation is certainly not a mechanical one, and it is not without that quirky reasonableness in the face of the unbearable that is a characteristic of Ignatow's poetry. (p. 28)