A reader will be struck at once by the call for attention of [the poems in Tread the Dark]—the way, in Heidegger's apt expression, that they "presence" themselves. The poems are convincing as authentic personae. Though they have one voice, Ignatow's, they are the different guises he speaks through: an abandoned animal in a cage, himself as his own child, an old man who regresses to an ovum, a suicide, a zebra, a wax figure in a museum, a vase, an explorer, a leaf. They reveal Ignatow's compulsion to accumulate all the things of the world in himself. But they will not stay there, separating themselves to sit regarding him from a distance, or inside his head.

The collection is in fact not ninety-one separate poems, but a series of probes into the nature of individual being by one whose poetry has long been established as messages from a particularly alert, original imagination. Most are linear and in free verse, but nearly a third are block poems, displayed in paragraphs. The block poems are effective word by word from beginning to end because the amplitude of the form accommodates itself to the matter-of-fact metamorphoses of fairy tales, which Ignatow utilizes for startling effects. The linear poems more often provide a different effect—of struggle, of contest, of unresolved inner debate.

There is a reason for these differences in structure which underlies what the poems are saying about essential form. In one poem Ignatow satirizes the idea of a national award to a poet for the "perfect form" of his poems. He itemizes the categories of dreadfulness in this age … to ask ironically of each whether it can become a poem of "perfect" form. Ignatow does not trust form, as he does not trust life, though loving both.

For Ignatow, the perfect form is in essence, not appearance. In the "Epilogue" the essence is seen to consist in the attitude itself of creating poetry, an attitude receptive to the "presencing" of created things: "The trees are tall gods / commanding a view / of my study. I bow / my head over my typewriter / and start the ceremony / of a prayer." To arrive persuasively, as Ignatow does, at this metaphysical conclusion through poems of the utmost physical particularity is an achievement which marks this collection as one of the most significant and satisfying recent volumes of poetry. (pp. 509-10)