In a photo on the front cover of Against the Evidence, David Ignatow stares out sternly at potential readers, as if to warn off those desiring to find ingratiating poems characterized by lyrical grace or elaborate design. In “Hello,” a brash broadside, he satirizes such poetry, ridiculing the presentation of a national award to a prominent poet for the perfect form of his poems: “Hello, drug addict, can you become a poem of perfect form? / “Hello, Mafia, can you become a poem of perfect form?”—and so on, referring at one point to “those bastards outside / who want to disturb us with their imperfect poems.” Clearly Ignatow considers himself to be one of those outsider bastards, on the ready to violate conventional standards and sensibilities whenever they threaten to stand in the way of his view of the world and his means of expression. This is not to say his only role is that of cranky curmudgeon, but that role gives him the elbow room to accomplish his various aims.

Coming to maturity in the thirties and publishing his first poems in that decade, Ignatow opened his poems to whatever details came under his sharp-eyed scrutiny, with a disposition to find truth in the unlovely, the grim, the miserable. It was, after all, the Depression. As he declared in a poem published in the following decade, “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” (“Get the Gasworks”). This view of America was rooted in the era and looks back to what had caught the attention of Stephen Crane in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Frank Norris in McTeague. Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie, Hart Crane in parts of “The Bridge,” or the Ash Can school of painters. The poetic realism here seems dated now, a little too close to Carl Sandburg. Nevertheless, the urban míse-en-scène, with all its jangling variety and existential pressures, was a source for much that is characteristic of Ignatow's work.

The attitude in the poem is distinctly American and democratic—elegance for Ignatow has always smacked of elitism and the effete. The gasworks are not an emblem of moral and cultural decay to be treated with Eliot's snooty distaste. Rather, Ignatow welcomes the noisy, gritty energy of the spectacle that “we find outside our window every morning,” epitomized by “the gaswork smokestack whistle tooting wisecracks.” A boy chasing a ball is killed under a coal truck, and the shocking finality is soberly registered, but “the kids keep tossing the ball around / after the funeral.” Life goes on. This poem celebrates the raw drama of the scene—along with the force of life itself—just as it celebrates capturing that scene in the poem. Ignatow is clearly in the lineage that stretches from Whitman through Williams, as has been pointed out in commentary on his work. Such lineal placement is fair enough as far as it goes, but it too neatly categorizes him, obscuring and diminishing the nature of his achievement.

Ignatow has pursued his own poetic instincts with a strong will, forming his singular poetic identity amid the fashions or movements that have swirled around him during his career of some sixty years. This selection of his poems, arranged chronologically so that the lines of his development become apparent, fittingly celebrates his eightieth birthday. From the outset he has subscribed to a nonaesthetic aesthetic. If at times, given this approach, his poems become blunt instruments, he generally exploits his seemingly matter-of-fact and prosaic style in subtle and effective ways. Often his poems assume an air of anecdote, as though the persona were saying, “Here's a brief report of something I experienced in daily life or in dream, nothing earthshaking but possibly of interest.” This strategy contributes to his deliberately “nonpoetic” voice, the voice we hear in “From a Dream,” for example: “I'm on a stair going down. / I must get to a landing / where I can order food / and relax with a newspaper.” Except for the effect of the line spacing and the urgency of the word “must,” the rhythm is that of casual, commonplace speech and goes along with the everydayness of “order food / and relax with a newspaper.” As the poem continues, we see how Ignatow can combine such plain speech with metaphysical implication: “I leave notes such as this on the steps. / There must be an end to them / and I will get to it, / just as did the builders, / if only I were sure now / that these were built / by human hands.”

In his prose poems, for which his approach is ideally suited, he could dispense with the convention of the line unit itself. The prose poem “On Freedom” begins, “In a dream I'm no longer in love. I breathe deeply this sense of freedom,” but he is still sealed in by his self-love, “committed to taking care of my body and its home accommodations” (“home accommodations”—a clumsy phrase that effectively brings us down to the mundane from the more lyrical beginning). Trapped in his ego, he wonders “what it would be like freed of brushing my teeth, washing my neck and face and between my toes” (how carefully the speaker's ego tends his body). What would it be like “as I neglect to move my bowels, and stay away from food that could sustain my health [another effectively flat phrase], and do not change my underwear, and let odors rise from my crotch and armpit.” Reduced to “ragged beard and sunken eyes and hollow cheeks,” he becomes “free of my self-love at last”; “I'm dying and I'm free.” The speaker is undefensively open here, dredging up and reporting the unlovely details of his bodily neglect, but the humor of these details along with the self-deflating “I stick out my tongue at the image in the mirror” accentuates how absurdly vulnerable mortal beings are. Here, the bizarre authenticity of dream lends credence. Indeed, just this kind of surreal edge distinguishes many of Ignatow's poems.

This poem offers a complex statement about the interrelationship of mortality, love, and freedom. Such freedom would seem to be a mixed blessing; the poem establishes a powerful tension between the possibilities of gain and loss. At what price freedom? How can one be human and alive without love? To be human, alive, and driven by love seems to entail being caught in a tragic and absurd web of competing desires. At any rate, in the short compass of the poem Ignatow, with neither pretension nor sentimentality, cannily maneuvers a reader toward such insights. Everything depends on the careful management of details and the modulations of tone. The voice is indelibly Ignatow's.

His voice is one a reader comes to trust in all its various moods (gruff, tender, funny, dark, full of wonder, angry, ironic, reflective), a voice quite stripped of affectation and poetic mannerism—not that a thoughtful strategy and consciousness of effect are ever lacking. What stands out is his stubborn individuality, his strict adherence to seeing things as they are, and his candid recognition of what it means to be human and mortal. Often there's a simplicity of utterance, an almost childlike engagement with universal issues such as death and eternity, with the result being a kind of wise innocence. “Going Down,” a concise allegory and an example of the kind of carefully wrought lyric that Ignatow can produce, reflects some of these qualities. To demonstrate this it is necessary to quote the whole poem; it's hard to think of what might be taken away or what might be added as the poem leads toward its paradoxical ending.

There's a hole in the earth I'm afraid of.
I lower myself into it, first tying
one end of a long rope to a tree close by,
the other end around my waist.
I let myself down hand over hand,
gripping the rope hard,
with each step planting my feet
solidly against the sides
that give off an earth odor.
As I descend I breathe less of air
and more a mingling of minerals and clay,
wet, heavy, close. I begin to lose
consciousness and I am afraid
I will loosen my grip on the rope
and fall to the bottom and be suffocated
by dirt chunks falling on top of me
from off the walls. It was this
fear of burial led me to climb down.

Ignatow's determination to write poems, often against the pull of despair, is akin to the experience narrated in this poem. In his preface to this volume, he refers to the anger and passion he experienced that had “spurred my earlier writing to portray the unhappy state of life. … If this was to be what life consisted of, then, in desperation, there was the need to fathom the nature of such an atrocity within ourselves … before letting oneself sink into despair, and to escape it and if possible to resolve it.” Writing poems, then, it would seem, means climbing down into the depth of that abyss in order to fathom its nature and thus come to terms with it. It is a courageous undertaking that may well explain why one feels such a palpable presence of the poet in his poems.