SOURCE: “David Ignatow's Post-Vietnam War Poetry,” in Centennial Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. 219-27.

In the following essay, Mazzaro urges readers to see Ignatow's anti-war poetry as part of a larger world view.

Audiences are likely to view David Ignatow's work in terms of Rescue the Dead (1968) and his various protests against America's involvement in Vietnam. The view is understandable, given the nearness of the volume's publication to Ignatow's appearance on the national scene and the liberal and anti-Vietnam War tones of the book and Ignatow's verse during the late sixties and early seventies. But the view wrongly fits Ignatow's contribution to a particular moment in history at the expense of earlier and ongoing concerns. Siding with underdogs, Ignatow has consistently shown a “decency of character” which, as James Wright notes, carries his work “beyond personal lyricism.”

Ignatow's persistent view of history as a dialectic of man and...