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.