SOURCE: “Circumscriptions: The Poetry of David Ignatow,” in Salmagundi, Nos. 22-23, Spring-Summer, 1973, pp. 164-86.

In the following essay, Mazzaro theorizes on the impact of brevity and common place subject matter in Ignatow's critical appeal.

David Ignatow began his poetic career announcing that he was “a man with a small song,” and the years since Poems (1948) have seen him extend the ranges of his poetry but never the magnitude of any single work. His individual poems are all “small songs,” and it is as a totality that they amount to something approaching a major voice. Randall Jarrell's remark in a review of The Gentle Weight Lifter (1955) that “one reads the poems with a mild blurred feeling of seeing them and not seeing them, a clear daze like water or late evening air” is especially apt. One is never sure whether one is reading a new poem or re-reading an...