[In the following excerpt, Bedient suggests that the success of selected poems in Facing the Tree indicate the quality that Ignatow might achieve.]

David Ignatow … began where Philip Levine began and has remained there, outside the great unities. The son of an immigrant Jew, he decided early that he would “never be able wholly to identify” himself with the country; and since his “business and family life” have proved a “tragic course,” as he painfully and repetitively observes in his Notebooks, he has concluded that “we stand alone … and everything is from bad to worse,” much though “the world is a long roar of activity, contradicting our despair and listlessness.”

There is anyway “no unity in life when one feels oneself drifting out of it, slowly being set apart by life itself.” Perhaps, then, in death … Death alone reduces the poet, now in his sixties, to lyricism. He walks upon and studies dirt and stone as his “next brothers and sisters.” And he falls asleep “as it were a poem / being written / to resolve my cares / into a final solution / and as my eyes close / and silence spreads itself / inside me like a wave / I know I am succeeding, / and in sleep rejoice.”

Yet Ignatow's manner still has much of the hardness it assumed when he sought a “world view” and found it “in the city itself. Hardness, an identity of oneself so that the world knows.” New York City, where he took over his father's bindery business, New York City with its “higgledy-piggledy movement for advantage,” taught him a rapid cynical style. He decided on “little sounds, one at a time and fast like machine-gun patter.” The “feverish tempo of the small factory racing against time to produce for profit”—his verse would accord with that. And grammatically it would not be too nice. If “all is for naught,” it would not make a fool of itself over anything, even itself. It would dig up the disagreeable, recognize failure, present a hard view of the subject, bite the matter off.

Ignatow's plainness is even more “anti-poetic” than William Carlos Williams's, lacking as it does the latter's untoward line-breaks and syntax elided toward immediacy. It shows little of Williams's “minute organization.” Its strength is a hard gusto. “Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf, / is to let rain fall nakedly upon your head”: this at least has the swiftness of liberation. And the style can be effectively flip, pungent as an alley breeze: “You're dead, what can I do for you?” If Brooklyn were poetry … On rare occasions the verse even tightens into a hard, hasty beauty that perhaps only C. H. Sisson has rivalled.

My poetry is for the night
of empty buses. I write,
depleted and hug my death.
Live for others, I hear whispered,
for the child growing,
face of a rushing stream. …

Yet two of these three examples are from Facing the Tree (1975), ripe fruit. Reading through Poems: 1934-1969, how seldom one delights in the style, how little it delights in itself. It is barely lived in, performed. “You take the dollar / and hand it to the fellow beside you / who turns and gives it to the next one / down the line”—the reader can only skim on with the words. “Until that child, one flight below, stops crying, / struck by its mother, I cannot sleep”—one responds to the situation, not the language, which actually detracts if one considers it: “struck by its mother” is nonsensically placed. And so it goes. Neither voice, rhythm, diction, phonetic color, nor image is worked anywhere near its best advantage.

Even with Facing the Tree one often gets only a taste of what might have been a feast. I quote “Autumn”:

A leaf lies shaking
at my door, about to be
blown away.
                                                  If I should
bring it into the still
air of my room, it would
lie quietly on the windowsill
facing the tree
from which it fell.

Evidence of what Denise Levertov calls “the beautiful simplicity of his language and rhythms”? Or, instead, a fine but colorless plainness, without the quickness of the exquisite? The truth is, I think, that Ignatow's simplicity reaches neither a full delicacy nor a full harshness. It is a tepid medium.

Yet I rejoice in Facing the Tree, so high is the level of achievement from poem to poem. The words, the forms, feel more sensitive than before. In “Autumn,” for instance, the lines break well and the discrete alliteration quiets the poem. Ignatow now keeps even the prose in his prose poems from sounding throwaway: “The fork I raise to my mouth should be the fork in a dream. … The dream I would be having would be of the world being dreamed as it should be: … the feel of a fork in my hand like that of silk. In the world where the steel for it is made the fork is hard and pointed. How may I live in silkiness until the dream brings me to a death entered with a silky ease.” This skillfully blends silken repetition with “hard and pointed” words. One need not blush to call it a “prose poem.”

And there is this to note, not only of Facing the Tree but of all Ignatow's volumes, that however dull the language the poems frequently have effect. They may lack the leap of surprise that makes poems end at their highest pitch, yet their very backbone is surprise. Ignatow's imagination is far odder, far more active, far more distinguished than his language. What a distance, for instance, that silky fork is from any conventional approach to death.

It is true that Ignatow's thought sometimes lacks rigor, as when he sinks an intelligent poem, “Dilemma,” by concluding: “And there too [in dying] we are caught, / by being planted too close to our parents”—an academic dilemma at best. Or he is too obvious, too insistent. In fact in Poems: 1934-1969 the bad work outnumbers and suffocates the good. So one rejoices, too, in Selected Poems, chosen and introduced by Robert Bly. Here the good pieces, freed, support one another. Both Ignatow and the reader gain.

Bly has arranged the poems according to their thematic thrust—good in that it underscores Ignatow's variety and even helps interpret a few poems; bad in that it misinterprets far more. You waste your time looking for what you never missed. Bly's forewords are too brief to be of use, and his afterword, with its prophecy that we will arrive one hundred years from now “at the instinct level,” has no discernible relation either to Ignatow or to common sense.

Finally Bly says nothing about Ignatow's poetry as such, seeming to prize him only for possessing attitudes consonant with his. This is collusion, not appreciation. Ignatow's artistry is neither so scant nor so glaring that it deserves to be passed over in silence. In fact, its extent and success are a vexed question.