If last is the position of honor in an omnibus review, then it belongs to David Ignatow. That he is a poet at all is a modest but encouraging testament to the resiliency of the poet in a difficult place and time. He lives honestly at the bottom of a world and manages to make poetry out of it. But it is a healthy bottom, far below fakery and the “literary world”; and though it has been said of Ignatow that he is the kind of poet who may confuse art with artifice, we'll take the chance. He is a poet the hard way, whose considerable spiritual sweat in the tenements and on the streets of the East Side actually shows through the work, giving it an honest rugged stink that we would recognize as genuine anywhere. While our mainstream of poets has been graduating from Harvard, Oxford, and Vanderbilt University—teaching literature, defining culture—Ignatow has been at work with not much more than himself, the East Side, and the prosody of Whitman. Within these limitations, and they are severe, he has achieved a decent colloquial simplicity. Living among the cultural proletariat he confronts the wild gargoyle, himself, in the mirror.

                                        My neighbor
growls at himself in the mirror
puts thumb to nose in derision
and whispers “Go kill yourself, you’re crazy.”

Trying to center himself in the crisis created by the modern cultural fellahin the “locked out” poets and artists, Ignatow is one of those many young Jews who have left middle class homes (his mother in the poem, “Story,” asks: “Where will it get you?”) to sit down in the Greenwich Village ghetto and the East Side. This can be an act of love, as we see from the poems, and not a flight from responsibility. Many of these emigrants go under, go wild, go blank, but Ignatow's achievement is that he is making poetry of this. And, as our critics might say, this is a good cultural phenomenon because it points to the irreducible nature of poetry, a response to a test and strong recuperative power—even if the tools are only Whitman's “Song of Myself” and a distrust of a wider area of art than the immediate thought and emotion. We are convinced Ignatow is writing meaningfully a certain kind of truth that strikes home to most of us, particularly in “Tenderness”:

Into the dark tunnel I went
to which they bid me into sportiveness
and daring sin against my tenderness:
into indifference and deliberate attacks.
I loved as they intended, and laughed.
I was with all, and was forgotten as any other
Out of the tunnel I crept, no longer myself,
without tenderness, without love,
with knowledge and sorrow,
too tired to kill, killed too often in return.
Willing to wait, hoping to love by armed truce

There are many faults in this: an outmoded diction that is too inclusive and relaxed—Ignatow is content only to state, when he should be looking for words and rhythms that will state it for him and eliminate much; he uses a prosody of yesterday, but the honesty makes it poetry.