David Ignatow has one of the strongest, strangest voices, and one of the most unique histories as a writer, of any contemporary American poet. Privileged with an extraordinary gift—that gift evident even in his earliest poems, published during the 1930's, but not represented in book form until two small collections published mid-century (Poems … and The Gentle Weight Lifter …), Ignatow was not really recognized as a major writer until the 1960's with [the] publication during that decade of three collections, Say Pardon, Figures of the Human, and Rescue the Dead. Today Ignatow continues to be both one of the most curiously rewarding and perhaps most unrewarded poets of his period. Like Miró's well-known dog, barking into more or less unresponsive darkness in a well-known painting, Ignatow has been a kind of watchdog of the American conscience and consciousness (not to mention his own conscience and consciousness) for...