In Cry of the Human, his remarkable collection of essays about contemporary American poets, Ralph J. Mills, Jr. takes the book's title and epigraph from a passage of David Ignatow's poetry: “… to be alone, to eat and sleep alone, to adventure alone: cry of the human …” In his long introductory essay, Mills writes “the contemporary poet recreates himself as a personality, an identifiable self within his poetry …” I have always felt close to the imaginary person at the center of David Ignatow's poetry, who speaks with an unmistakable voice that has remained constant for over sixty years.

In his most renowned book, Rescue the Dead, of 1968, Ignatow confronted the country's turmoil and his own in a voice that sounded as I imagined my father's voice would if he wrote poetry instead of sold insurance door to door from early morning until late at night. It was the poetry of a man who lived, worked, and suffered among common people and drew upon that experience for his art.

The voice of Rescue the Dead was clear to the point of clairvoyance, yet also deep in a dream-like, Kafkaesque way. Here were poems that for me dramatized the immigrants' struggle with life and language and more than compensated for any lack of traditional trappings by creating deep images in an almost universal language—simple, powerful, unadorned.

David Ignatow was speaking for my father and all those who, during and after the Depression, were overwhelmed by the need to survive in their adopted country. But his poetry was about sons as well as fathers. It was about Ignatow the son and his strained relationship with his father the bindery shop owner as well as his relationship with America the father. It was also about Ignatow the father and his painful relationship with his son as well as his deeply satisfying relationship with his daughter.

There was so much that I could identify with in Rescue the Dead. Ignatow's poetry took place not in field, forest, or pasture but on big city streets and in big city apartments, houses, and offices. His poems faced up to the Vietnam war, racial confrontations, and political assassinations, as well as violent and vulgar crimes that did not always make headlines. His poems looked unflinchingly at life's dark side.

In 1968 Ignatow's voice seemed a new kind of American poetic voice: blunt, straightforward, urban. It was also a voice imbued with Yiddish syntax, intonations, and accents: “I had a friend and he died. Me. / I forgot to mourn him that busy day / earning a living.” This was a long way from the Shakespearean or Miltonic iambic pentameter line. Nevertheless, it was very similar to the speech I heard in Detroit while I was growing up. It was with the Vietnam War that the literature of ethnic and racial minorities surfaced significantly in American literature, and Ignatow was part of that flowering.

Almost thirty years after the publication of Rescue the Dead, Ignatow has published a last book, I Have a Name, to add to his fifteen previous volumes. While the poet's voice is consistent with the voice of his earlier poems, he engages in a series of brief, retrospective conversations about matters that have long engaged his attention and that he seems at last able to resolve.

Now in his eighties, he can settle accounts with himself and others. Thus, in “I've Nothing to Offer,” a poem of eight lines, the speaker asks forgiveness “for the cruelty of the impersonal / in myself,” but reckons that he must accept himself if he is to forgive others. While the poem ends surprisingly quickly, what resonates in the reader's mind is the tone and timbre of the voice at its moment of resolution.

The process of “I've Nothing to Offer” is elaborated in poems about the poet's long and troubled marriage to Rose Graubart that ended only recently with her death. In “I was an Angry Man,” he admits to his own anger and to mistakes by both marriage partners, leaving them “looking / at each other / in the hollow of their home.” “Listening” is an imaginary conversation with his daughter in which he takes pride in the fact that he remained married despite complicating his own life and “was lifted up in joy” as a result.

“I Have Written You Off” is one of several conversations with his deceased wife. Here he expresses his relief that she can no longer directly enter his life and has become purely the subject of his poetry. He hopes that by offering a poem he can compensate for “the failure / between us.” In the final poem in the volume, “For Rose,” the poet says goodbye to his wife with a note of irony and defiance: “When my name is called / it is not me / you are calling.” Somehow his name has come to mean infinity.

Ignatow's brief poems leave this reader with innuendoes and reverberations of meaning. This is partly because of the brevity, simplicity, and plainness of the style but also because of the bare, stripped-down physical settings and circumstances of the poems. As he has grown older, he has come more and more to confront the world of his own mind, which reflects his simple, austere, introspective lifestyle. This is indeed the human cry of a man who lives alone.

Yet Ignatow has his human attachments, and for this reader the most satisfying poems in I Have a Name are addressed to friends and fellow poets with whom he shares the affirmation of having come through life's trials and prevailed. I refer to “Dear Robert” for Robert Bly, “Stanley Kunitz,” and “We,” a love poem for his companion Virginia Terris. These are poems of a man looking back “with love / newly acquired in old age / and the sadness that is mine / of love so long delayed.” That toward the end of a long and trying life and career, David Ignatow could write such poignant and positive poems of love and friendship is cause for rejoicing for those who knew and admire the man and his poetry.