Against the Evidence

For over half a century, David Ignatow has crafted spare, plain, haunting poetry pf working life, urban images, and dark humor. The poetic heir of Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Ignatow is characteristically concerned with human mortality and human alienation in the world: the world as it is, defined by suffering and despair, yet at crucial times redeemed by cosmic vision and shared lives. His development as a poet is chronicled in Against the Evidence, title of the poem in part quoted above and meant by Ignatow as the metaphor for the whole body of his work. Where his previous collections have been organized thematically, Ignatow here arranges his poems according to the decade in which they were written.returning each to its chronological order. Against the Evidence charts the evolution of his themes from the earliest origin in the Thirties to their present extraordinary manifestation in a variety of poetic forms and modes. Ignatow is one of those rare writers who begin somewhat out of step and end up decades later sounding unquestionably contemporary. The times have had to catch up with him. His language, which is without ornament and beautiful in its honesty, does not date -Poetry DAVID IGNATOW has published fifteen volumes of poetry and three prose collections. Born in Brooklyn, he has lived most of his life in the New York metropolitan area, working as editor of American Poetry Review and Beloit Poetry Journal, and poetry editor of The Nation. Ignatow received both the Shelley Memorial Award (1966) and the Frost Medal (1992). He has received the Bollingen Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, and countless other awards.

"These poems have a modest dignity which is ill-served by the modish and boring comments of Robert Bly, which are everywhere among the small but fine selection made by Bly. Ignatow has a sense of a people existing within the historic moment, but his cool tenderness never freezes into the pompous ice of theory. Sometimes his poems are as simple as newspaper paragraphs, but they are soon lifted into the realm of music, humor and feeling by Ignatow's ability to put the urban fact into wide perpective. He sees the patterns without which poetry can't exist, but he always senses the trembling human skin." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)

For over half a century, David Ignatow has crafted spare, plain, haunting poetry pf working life, urban images, and dark humor. The poetic heir of Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Ignatow is characteristically concerned with human mortality and human alienation in the world: the world as it is, defined by suffering and despair, yet at crucial times redeemed by cosmic vision and shared lives. His development as a poet is chronicled in Against the Evidence, title of the poem in part quoted above and meant by Ignatow as the metaphor for the whole body of his work.

Where his previous collections have been organized thematically, Ignatow here arranges his poems according to the decade in which they were written...returning each to its chronological order. Against the Evidence charts the evolution of his themes from the earliest origin in the Thirties to their present extraordinary manifestation in a variety of poetic forms and modes.

Rare poetry concerning human mortality and alienation.