David Ignatow has one of the strongest, strangest voices, and one of the most unique histories as a writer, of any contemporary American poet. Privileged with an extraordinary gift—that gift evident even in his earliest poems, published during the 1930's, but not represented in book form until two small collections published mid-century (Poems … and The Gentle Weight Lifter …), Ignatow was not really recognized as a major writer until the 1960's with [the] publication during that decade of three collections, Say Pardon, Figures of the Human, and Rescue the Dead. Today Ignatow continues to be both one of the most curiously rewarding and perhaps most unrewarded poets of his period. Like Miró's well-known dog, barking into more or less unresponsive darkness in a well-known painting, Ignatow has been a kind of watchdog of the American conscience and consciousness (not to mention his own conscience and consciousness) for some 40 years now. It seems increasingly a kind of modest tragedy in the history of American poetry that critically the poet received little attention until the 1960's….

Still, if the quietly intimate, self-searching (and therefore universal-psyche-searching) voice of David Ignatow was not really heard until relatively recently, the problem is partly Ignatow's own fault. This is a poet who needs an editor. It is an aspect of Ignatow's talent that he is a truly copious poet, who pours out his gems quite generously—assuming that gems ought to be found in cornucopias. Still, the work at its best is irreducible and right, even if unlike a prolific poet Ignatow seems to have adopted as his spiritual father, Walt Whitman, alluded to increasingly in the work, Ignatow's visions have their limits, turning inward as determinedly as Whitman's turned outward….

Like its predecessor, Facing the Tree,… [Tread the Dark] shows a poet at the height of his powers, secure in his mastery—and, therefore, relentlessly exploring…. In form, the book reflects, with similar sanguineness, Ignatow's disinterest in quasi-academic "testings"—one being that great canard in contemporary American literary cocktail-party chit-chat, the so-called "argument" between prose poem vs. verse poem. Ignatow stomps on that distracting snake with a sure, which is to say, implicit foot. He denies it! While Tree contained a number of prose poems, in a manner tentatively contemptuous of merely categorical distinctions, in Tread the Dark, verse poems and prose poems often alternate. To the extent to which Ignatow's book develops a philosophical or psychological argument …, the prose poems serve the same purpose as the verse. Stylistically, taken poem-by-poem, all one can say is that this poet's work has—in several senses—a lot of nerve…. Ignatow's poems in this book have, tonally speaking, unshakeable poise, sitting comfortably as if in literal armchairs (though deskchairs would be more like it), in the midst of the Human Dilemma. Echoing Whitman … the writer (in poem #32) phrases it:

                  I am an affectionate man.
                  I love the differences
                  That compose me.

Fair enough. If there is one thing we know from the thrust and posture of contemporary poetry, it is that one must learn to love internal differences. But Ignatow goes a step further [in poem #16], taking into account the realistic fact that some of those factors in the poet's interior may be horrifying…. Thus, this odd step in the long, continuing, contemporaneous dialectic of self-awareness as Good. It is Ignatow's essential contribution: his lendscape: If the self is to be accepted, what then if one doesn't like that self?…

[I believe a certain quality of the Double Bind to be] characteristic of Tread the Dark, not to mention a certain direction in Ignatow's work in general…. [The] "Double Bind" is descriptive of a circumstance in which one has two choices, both alternatives seemingly leading to disaster or even annihilation…. These implicitly self-imposed double-binds are a most rambunctious, problematical part of Ignatow's philosophy if not esthetic (for it is an aspect of Ignatow's art that the poems work, even when they do not "work out" these double-binds). They lead, at their most extreme, almost inevitably, to such visions of total self-attrition as one finds in "The Suicide."…

Ignatow is a poet who, while psychological and (to use Bly's by-now rightfully celebrated term) "Inward" in interest, is far from regarding his job as being The Lyricizing of The Psyche….

One of the dangers of this almost relentlessly melancholy, perhaps doomful, view of existence is, quite naturally, the writing of a poetry of pure Complaint. Curiously enough, Ignatow's work in Tread the Dark skirts that danger by various strategies of style and tone. After all, double-binds (or "Conflicts" as they are sometimes called) are potentially, if properly framed in thinking or writing, manageable. Ignatow is a master composer in the interest of that composure in the presence of difficulty; the bleak burden of this book is lightened by access to grace notes of interior poise and humor. Indeed, Ignatow is not afraid to invite the invigoratingly bizarre into his writing…. (p. 4)

Ignatow, in the midst of a certain sadness, is not above making a recognizable and sensible joy, even to the point of making fun of himself. Such a poem is surely the one in which the poet equates the act of continuing to go on living, with the watering of his plants, "knowing that the world would end with the demise of all plants" (#77). Perhaps the ultimate gesture in this direction, for the reader of Ignatow's poetry generally, occurs in "I'm a Depressed Poem" (#86), in which the poet says with finality: "You probably understand [this], from experience; gone through something like it yourself which may be why you hold me this long. I've made you thoughtful and sad and now there are two of us. I think it's fun…." (p. 5)