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Title: I Have a Name (Wesleyan Poetry) by David Ignatow ISBN: 0819522406 Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5

Rating: 5
Summary: Ignatow's Poetry and It's Solace
Comment: 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