At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties

Drawing from his literary fathers Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Bollingen Prize-winning poet David Ignatow eschews ornamentation in favor of embracing the fierce, uncompromising truths of the human spirit in his eighteenth collection.

New Mexico

The sun blazes in silence
for there is no one to speak to
like the sun. The men sit
under it, bored, filled
with inferiorities and resentments
which they turn toward the blue onyx
of the sky, sending up planes
in defiance, whipping the air,
but nothing is said, for the sun
leaves behind its own contempt:
darkness and cold.

Praise for the collection

“Complex, beautiful, lacerated with living and with toil, uncompromising. Yet, for all that, there is an easy grace and Athenian simplicity.” —William Billiter