“The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts,” William Carlos Williams once observed. This impressive gathering of thirty-five years of David Ignatow's poems bears out Williams' remark. The important terms—“human value,” “intense vision” and “facts”—are descriptive of the kind of poetry Ignatow has produced so consistently, and too frequently without the recognition won by some of his more celebrated contemporaries.

Nothing is so impressive at first glance about Ignatow's writing—and there are included in the present volume, chronologically arranged, many previously uncollected and unpublished poems—as the unity it possesses, a unity which derives from the emergence of a singular voice, an identifiable poetic personality. One detects changes in this voice and personality; these are the result of deepening experience, mature reflectiveness and the increasing development of imaginative and technical powers. But from the start Ignatow has endowed his work with the indefinable, absolutely unmistakable signature of his own being—the consequence of putting the burden of the self completely on the line for the composition of every poem.

I don't mean by this simply an open confession of private emotions, much less an exposure of one's failings or weaknesses, though Ignatow never disowns his feelings, and at times relentlessly probes his own nature. Rather, I am referring to an unsparing honesty—the “intense vision”—toward experience, whether that experience is of inwardness and the hidden self, of relationships with others or of the wider life of society. Authenticity speaks to us from every line of Ignatow's poetry, reaching into our lives with the force and deliberation of the seemingly unassuming art which he has subtly and skillfully shaped.

Ignatow is, in a primary sense, a poet of place, of New York and environs, and consequently dramatizes the hurried, frustrated, often anguished existence of the urban American under pressure to make money and achieve some measure of security and rest. His poems of the 1940s in particular return to these concerns:

Tonight reality is in the rest
I have found from murdering myself
racing through streets,
my mind racing ahead,
my body pounding after
money—green as grass!

But Ignatow penetrates imaginatively both the actualities of himself as a person and the circumstances of the world beyond himself, suffers and assimilates what he discovers until it can be articulated in the form of a poem; that is the substance of “Day My Dream”:

The explosive
mouth that fragments the atmosphere;
the old woman who drools on a bus
crowded with intensely dressed salesmen.
How they look away in disgust.
All this is normal to me,
as the face in my mirror each morning—
lined by guilt of the night;
lips relaxed from rightness, creases
under the eyes enfolding pleasure
in dark folds.
                                                                                Since the tunnel
in which I have acted out my dreams
has been lit with these passions,
revealing my form, I converse with all,
as if night were day and my dream.

Whether writing of Bowery bums, his experiences as a hospital clerk, the joys and conflicts of love, the prospects of death (as he comes more often to do with age) or the ironies and threats of history, Ignatow handles the language and rhythms of his poems with an enviable flexibility, ease and directness:

Get the gasworks in a poem
and you've got the smoke and smokestacks,
the mottled red and yellow tenements,
and grimy kids who curse with the pungency
of the odor of gas. You've got America, boy.

Yet such characteristics exist within the firmly achieved dimension of that poetic voice which Ignatow has found, made his own, and continued to perfect with an apparent casualness and surface simplicity that will not deceive any reader who attends closely to the expanding range of effects it can command and the depths and resonances of experience it can disclose. Frequently, as in “The Errand Boy I,” he creates the extraordinary concentration and allusiveness of a contemporary parable but does so without ever detaching his poem from our awareness of the specific day-to-day realities from which it arises:

To get quicker through the day
and to bring on night as a blessing,
to lie down in a sleep that is a dream
of completion, he takes up his package
from the floor—he has been ordered
to do so, heavy as it is, his knees weakening
as he walks, one would never know
by his long stride—and carries it
to the other end of the room.

Ignatow's commitment to a particular environment, its language and lives, and his life enacted in its midst, is declared with vehement energy in “Where Nothing Is Hidden,” a poem in which he abandons scornfully the self-deceiving refuge of the suburbs for the harsh, ugly, destructive surroundings of the city:

Scream and yell and pound on the walls here in the city,
to be ignored or beaten down.
Speak of the bitter with your last breath
and sweep the whole city into the sea
with a gesture or drive your car off the dock,
taking with you the city's death,
but none of the green vomit
of those who spill their guts
and stand on it in silence like trees
that hide their birds from one another
and live for hundreds of years
without comment.

An important aspect of Ignatow's imaginative growth becomes evident in the increasing number of poems during the last two decades that incorporate or build upon elements of fantasy, dream and the irrational. A highly evocative imagery permits the pursuit of elusive perceptions and states of being. Similarly, in his prose poems of the 1960s Ignatow has successfully joined dreamlike or nightmare effects with his social and moral concerns, presenting each poem as if it were a miniature drama. The reader may, as a result, envisage these poems as unfolding like the events of a play in his head; but quite conceivably they could also be adopted for live stage performance.

Ignatow's later poems frequently look long and hard at the poet's life, his desires and failures, the difficulties, pains and resolutions of marriage, the arrival of middle-age, and the promise of death which generates a sense of bleakness and futility. The haunting mood and scene of “The Moon” are inspired by such feelings:

I walk beneath it, seeing a stranger
look down on my familiar state. I walk,
and it does not know where or for what
reason on the black surface of the earth.
I hurry, it is late. I disappear
into the dark shadow of a building,
running, and ask of the moon
what does it expect to discover,
what does it do in the sky,
staring down on the intimate
despairing actions of a man?

Themes of moral darkness, violence, nihilism and personal horror reach their climax in a series of three terrible “Ritual” poems; and so, purged to a degree of these disturbing preoccupations, Ignatow can conclude “A Meditation on Violence,” which follows a few pages after, with thoughts about the shifting temperaments of children at play whose swiftly alternating shouts of happiness and anger “show the meaning to my life / is to celebrate, always to celebrate.” The last sections from Rescue the Dead (1968) and the subsequent group of ten new pieces rise to a lyrical plane of acceptance, reconciliation, love and affirmation; these are certainly among Ignatow's most beautiful and moving poems. “Walk There,” dedicated to Marianne Moore, is a poem of pilgrimage from the forest's dense enclosure and bewildering tracklessness toward open space, the possibilities proclaimed by extending horizons:

The way through the woods is past trees,
touching grass, bark, stone, water and mud;
into the night of the trees, beneath
their damp cold, stumbling on roots,
discovering no trail, trudging
and smelling pine, cypress and musk.
A rabbit leaps across my path,
and something big rustles in the bush.
Stand still, eye the nearest tree
for climbing. Subside in fear
in continued silence. Walk.
See the sky splattered with leaves.
Ahead, is that too the sky
or a clearing?
Walk there.

This collection of poems clearly stakes an irrevocable claim for Ignatow as one of the best, most durable poets of his generation, a generation which also includes Roethke, Berryman, Shapiro and Lowell. No wonder that among the few writers mentioned in his poems and dedications, Whitman and Williams stand out; for following their example he has placed himself in the tradition of those genuine poets who have, in independent ways, struggled to create a living American poetry from the immediacies of existence in this country, from the tragedies and potentialities of its legacy, and from the abundant music and vitality of its language. David Ignatow's accomplishment now becomes plain.

I want my trees to love me
and my grass to reach up to the porch
where I am no one but the end of time,
as I stand waiting for renewal in my brain,
because I am what the sun shines forth:
I am labor, I am a disposition to live.
Who dies? Only the sun
but you must wait
while I live.