SOURCE: Review of Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994, in Poet, Vol. CLXV, No. 4, January, 1995, pp. 219-21.

In the following excerpt, Wojahn reviews Against the Evidence, which, he argues, is primarily about money, family, and mortality.

Since David Ignatow began publishing in the early 1930's, his career has spanned ten presidential administrations, and four wars. He has witnessed the waxing and waning of literary modernism, and has come to enjoy the status of Grand Old Man. With the exception of Stanley Kunitz, no prominent American poet of today has been gifted with such a long career; but Ignatow's longevity seems not to have tempted him to play the role of wearisome cultural custodian in the manner of many other Grand Old Men. He possesses none of the later Frost's hectoring Cold-Warrior conservatism, and none of the aged Sandburg's treacly populism; Ignatow plays the Grand Old Man only so...