SOURCE: “Four American Poets,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, Spring, 1976, pp. 359-61.

In the following excerpt, Bedient suggests that the success of selected poems in Facing the Tree indicate the quality that Ignatow might achieve.

David Ignatow … began where Philip Levine began and has remained there, outside the great unities. The son of an immigrant Jew, he decided early that he would “never be able wholly to identify” himself with the country; and since his “business and family life” have proved a “tragic course,” as he painfully and repetitively observes in his Notebooks, he has concluded that “we stand alone … and everything is from bad to worse,” much though “the world is a long roar of activity, contradicting our despair and listlessness.”

There is anyway “no unity in life when one feels oneself drifting out of it, slowly being set apart by life itself.” Perhaps, then, in death...