[Tread the Dark] contains some of the best work of [David Ignatow's] that I have seen. Ignatow … is contemptuous of "perfect form": in Poem 88 he mocks, in one of his few explicitly angry statements, the American poetry establishment which at one time made a virtue of well-groomed, fastidiously-wrought incapacity. It is hardly a revelation to say that Ignatow writes in the tradition of Whitman and Williams, and that he has developed a conversational, understated tone that would make a poem of his immediately recognizable anywhere. Yet in Tread the Dark, in the parable-like prose poems especially, there is a quizzical, highly intellectual consciousness at work, an intelligence that hides itself, paradoxically, behind what might be called the "simple speech" of everyday life. Ignatow's art isn't simple, however, any more than Williams's was. One encounters in their poetry the casual ease of common speech employed to record distinctly uncommon...