David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn, New York. The son of a businessman, he attended the Brooklyn public schools and has lived in New York City most of his life. In 1939 he married the painter Rose Graubart, to whom several of his volumes are dedicated; they have a son and a daughter. At the insistence of his parents, Ignatow toiled for years as a businessman and attained the presidency of a bindery firm. His distaste for the business life and his ambivalent feelings about the members of his family are recorded at length in The Notebooks of David Ignatow (1973). These concerns also fill his poetry, for Ignatow is the most autobiographical of writers.

Critical recognition has come gradually to him. It accrued during the 1960s when Wesleyan University Press published three of his collections, and the last of these, Rescue the Dead (1968), won high praise. Beginning with the...