David Ignatow's poems have an unusual openness to the consciousness of the collective. We are more used to poets open to the personal unconscious. If the "dark side" is thought of as a part of the personal unconscious, we notice that David Ignatow sees his dark side clearly only after he has seen it reflected in the angers and frustrations of the collective, when he sees it embodied in a stabber moving through a subway car. He is a poet of the community, of people who work for a living, as Whitman was too, but he is also a great poet of the collective. Reading him we experience in a deep way our union with the collective. (p. 127)

"Rescue the Dead" is a mysterious and marvellous poem, in which the meanings of "to live" and "to be dead" keep shifting, as well as the meanings of "to love" and "to be alive." There is some sort of ecstasy in the poem as well, perhaps from having faced these intricate ideas so imaginatively.

Like Rilke, Ignatow notices that human emotions are not becoming less insistent, but more insistent, and they have greater influence upon events. The sorrow cannot be dissipated. The stairs he goes down in a dream, if not "built by human hands," then perhaps were built by God, or by hard, chill instincts. The poem with those stairs in it is another hint that Western man is moving again into the nonhuman, into a state that interested the Greeks.

It is thought that rituals are a form that instinct behavior takes in human beings, modified by civilization. It is interesting that Ignatow has written three "Rituals."

His work says that we are caught in the collective consciousness, and therefore we are unable to rescue the dead, who now live helpless in that vast consciousness, longing to be rescued. "You who are free, rescue the dead." I think one of David Ignatow's loveliest qualities is that unlike Shelley, who claims he is free and we are all imprisoned, Ignatow does not claim to be free. He asks those who are free to rescue the dead. (p. 128)