These new poems by the author of Saint Judas and The Green Wall embody a sharp break with his earlier work. Their impact is well described by the British critic Michael Hamburger: "He has absorbed the work of modern Spanish and other continental poets and evolved a medium of his own. This medium dispenses with argument and rhetoric, and presents the pure substance of poetry, images which are 'the objective correlatives' of emotion and feeling. It is only in the new collection that Wright has found this wholly distinctive voice."

Mr. Wright is well known for his previous books and his...

With that three-line epigraph, David Ignatow declares the thrust and purpose of his compelling new book. Unlike his previous work, which was written largely in reaction to the world about him--the urban landscape with its clamor and violence and business pressures--these new poems turn inward. They explore and confirm the individual in his never ending search for awareness and realization: a process in which conflict, love, sorrow, and insight in the end come together into a precarious balance that is its own form of peace.

For over half a century, David Ignatow has crafted spare, plain, haunting poetry pf working life, urban images, and dark humor. The poetic heir of Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Ignatow is characteristically concerned with human mortality and human alienation in the world: the world as it is, defined by suffering and despair, yet at crucial times redeemed by cosmic vision and shared lives. His development as a poet is chronicled in Against the Evidence, title of the poem in part quoted above and meant by Ignatow as the metaphor for the whole body of his work. Where his previous...

Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1997)

The wondrous subtlety of David Ignatow's art is brought to bear on the timeless themes of love and death. Intimate remembrances evince a rich life: Hebrew lessons, war, first love, friendships with Stanley Kunitz and others, his wife's death. One poem comments on another, often with wit and irony; no statement is ever final. In this way, Ignatow shows that we exist most fully in the fluidity of our perceptions and in our inability to attain a single state of mind or definition of things. I Have A Name is a vital engagement with...

Life Is What I Wanted David Ignatow and Virginia Terris (editor) The final collection from the late poet, David Ignatow, who died in November 1997. Most of the poems in Life Is What I Wanted were written in the final years of his life and display Ignatow's uncanny ability to pressure each syllable and word so that the poem discovers many connotations besides the literal.

"The poetry of Mary Crow is as we would expect of an artist deeply troubled by her experiences. The writing is taut, lean with the struggle to persevere and become its own true cause; and by the grace and the power of her art, the poems in Borders are kept from vanishing into the pain itself, thereby making a voice and presence for herself that is the fulfillment of her search for self. In short, she is the quintessential artist who is made whole by the very processes of art. Let us welcome Mary Crow to the company of poets."-- David Ignatow