This is my favorite James Wright book. These poems are stunning in their visual images and breathtaking in their emotional impact. I am completely hooked.

I stumbled upon this book by accident, and loved it so much I read it in one night. It is an emotional experience to read it. The intense feeling described in some of the poems, and unusual views on societies dark side are excellently written. I recommend this book a cross between Walt Whittman & Edgar Allen Poe writing poems from the world in the 50's and 60's with an editorial flair. It is hard to describe but I loved it.

On a plane trip some years ago, a friend of mine was sitting next to a young woman who was sobbing quietly. When my friend asked her what was wrong she told him her father had died that morning and she was flying home for the funeral. My friend had with him a book of David Ignatow's poetry. Instinctively, he handed it to her. She became absorbed in it for the remainder of the flight. As they landed, she thanked him. The book, she said, had soothed her pain. To read Ignatow-then as now-is to find yourself confronting a solitary world, consoled by palpable, responsive silence. Since the publication in 1948 of his first collection, the directness of Ignatow's writing has set him apart from his contemporaries, especially those whose methods include overarching formalist literary schemes. Ignatow's method has always been simplicity itself: Finding himself in a strange place, often in panic (but in amusement, as well), he uses whatever is available to make a transcend! ent sense of it. For the rest of us, perhaps tied to overarching personal and social strategies in daily life, we turn to Ignatow and find he has done the hard work for us. In his 1991 collection, Shadowing the Ground, as he approached his eightieth birthday in shaky health, Ignatow reckoned himself at the end of his life. The poems in that volume face impending death squarely, heroically. "I killed a fly," he wrote. "Tired of the day and with night coming on/ I lay my body down beside the fly." But now, in his new collection, something has changed. He didn't die. He survived the battle; he continues on. What should he do? In "Since Then" he attempts to answer it this way: ... Since then, I have had nothing to say, inwardly silent, sun warming me to write: what I am left to do. I Have A Name presents poems dealing with subjects familiar to Ignatow's readers: the expected violence or surprising gentleness one encounters in meetings with others; early memories of family a! nd friends, with their confusions and contradictions laid b! are and not always resolved; and the singular mysteries inherent in common things, such as cars on a highway or ordering food in a restaurant. But there is a new subject in Ignatow's work that, given age and health, must have been inevitable: the decay and destruction of the human body. In two facing prose poems, Moths and The Man Who Fell Apart in the Street as He Walked, even Ignatow's ironic humor can't mask for long the real horror. In the former poem, a man who begins by killing a moths' nest ends up being devoured by relentless moths. In the latter, a man's body literally falls apart on a crowded sidewalk. People watching don't bother to help; instead, they take his disintegration as an insult. These are poems of real power-an achievement proving the transcendence of human persistence and awareness. --Sandy McIntosh

This collection of poetry by Ignatow deals with issues of death. He explores the different relationships he has had in his life through his work and also explores what the afterlife will be like. Highly recommend.

I had the honor and pleasure of working with David Ignatow in his poetry workshop classes at the 92ed St. Y in Manhattan. That was in 1980-81. Now, twenty years since I worked with him, I read these poems from SHADOWING THE GROUND with even greater care and tenderness than when I first read them in 1991.

With David's death, these poems that shadow death, take on an added poignancy. By their very nature they grieve for all of us and for his own passing on. This grief is evoked from the reader and from the deceased poet himself. In these poems we feel his pallpable saddness in realizing that his life is moving into its last years. This book, although not his last before his death, stands as a farewell journal in which he shares with great honesty the perspective of entering a time in life in which it is nearly impossible not to deal with one's own impending death - even if there are some years ahead.

David Ignatow accomplishes this task with the same honest tenderness and quiet humor I experienced in him as a teacher. I also find much sadness in these poems and even moments of cynicism. But when one loves life, it is sad to contemplate losing it. And if a person lives long enough, he or she will see many go first and feel the loss. David touches on all of this in his poems, and there wells up pains from the past, disappointments, regrets, embarassments at the indignities of getting old, he spares nothing in this testimony to living and coping in the shadow of death. But, and this is the greatest value of these poems, he cleans his house of grief with grief. He scours himself with it until he brings you with him to a place of growth and philosophical understanding. This impacts the reader powerfully, and puts joy back in place alongside sadness:

"I live with my contradictions intact, seeking transcendence but loving bread. I shrug at both and from behind the summer screen I look out upon the dark, knowing death as one form of transcendence, but so is life."

David was one of my mentors. He remains so.

David Ignatow was probably one of the most accomplished, yet unrecognized American poets of the twentieth century. During the course of his career, he was awarded the Bollingen prize by Yale and the Bollingen Foundation, as well as two Guggenheim fellowships. He was the editor of a number of literary reviews, and was a past president of the elite Poet's Society of America. His work spread over 50 years, and throughout his career he focused on the motif of death, dying, and life, and how they relate to existence. His poetic style is that of a storyteller: in his poetry the sentence has much greater significance than the line, and this becomes immediately apparent especially in this collection because he segments it into sections, complete with prologue. While I am not wholly familiar with other collections of the author's, I was almost disappointed with this anthology. Even though it contains fantastic poetry that is all centered around common themes, some of his poems in this work are too similar to other poems in the same collection to make them stand out. That is not to say, however, that it lacks any real gems: my favorites are the beautiful title poem "Rescue the Dead," the metaphysical study "An Ontology," and the comic "Love in a Zoo."