A reader will be struck at once by the call for attention of [the poems in Tread the Dark]—the way, in Heidegger's apt expression, that they "presence" themselves. The poems are convincing as authentic personae. Though they have one voice, Ignatow's, they are the different guises he speaks through: an abandoned animal in a cage, himself as his own child, an old man who regresses to an ovum, a suicide, a zebra, a wax figure in a museum, a vase, an explorer, a leaf. They reveal Ignatow's compulsion to accumulate all the things of the world in himself. But they will not stay there, separating themselves to sit regarding him from a distance, or inside his head.

The collection is in fact not ninety-one separate poems, but a series of probes into the nature of individual being by one whose poetry has long been established as messages...