Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems

Ignatow, who died in 1997 at the age of 83, led a distinguished if not meteoric career as a man of letters, having been poet-in-residence at the University of Kentucky and Vassar, a professor at Columbia University and poetry editor for the Nation, not to mention having won several awards including the Bollingen and two Guggenheims--and having started out in his father's bookbinding business in depression-era Brooklyn. As the title to this posthumous volume, edited by Virginia Terris, Jeanette Hopkins and daughter Yaedi Ignatow, suggests, Ignatow gave his last years to a philosophical search for the meaning of ""living"": readers can discover some curious answers in these often understated, at times sparely elegant, but always accessible poems. Ignatow's humility, and his secular, unmystical stance, give his voice a startling confidence: ""Patient we wait/ so that/ once dead/ we'll know perhaps just who we were,/ with others thinking back on us."" (""All Living is Lying"") The bookends of birth and death subsume the book, often powerfully. Ignatow's metrics seek the simplicity of William Carlos Williams, whose tone he occasionally adopts, or else the Elizabethan overtones of Robert Creeley. Sometimes the poems sound rushed, or unrevised. Yet the poet is still capable of praise, and finds pleasure in his transitional place in the universe. As the short but perfect ""Make of me its purpose,"" with its subtle, lilting internal rhyme, states: ""Let the sun be the creative one/ and make of me its purpose/ of which I know nothing/ except its aging me/ as if I knew that being creative/ is its aim, that is,/ if the sun knows, if at all."" (Sept.)