David Ignatow's poems have an unusual openness to the consciousness of the collective. We are more used to poets open to the personal unconscious. If the "dark side" is thought of as a part of the personal unconscious, we notice that David Ignatow sees his dark side clearly only after he has seen it reflected in the angers and frustrations of the collective, when he sees it embodied in a stabber moving through a subway car. He is a poet of the community, of people who work for a living, as Whitman was too, but he is also a great poet of the collective. Reading him we experience in a deep way our union with the collective. (p. 127)

"Rescue the Dead" is a mysterious and marvellous poem, in which the meanings of "to live" and "to be dead" keep shifting, as well as the meanings of "to love...