Poetry

Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems

David Ignatow was, in Gerald Stern's words, the "gatekeeper between life and death." Nowhere is that more apparent than in Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems, the twentieth and final collection by one of the most prolific and compassionate writers of this century. Vibrant with what Harvey Shapiro called "the life of struggle," the poems address the imminence of death honestly and boldly, acknowledging its necessity and its mystery. Ignatow, as gatekeeper, examines the divided between life and death in some of the most moving and compromising poems he ever wrote.

Someone of the past

Someone of the past is dying in front of me,
her face immobile.
She sees herself in me, dying too.

What we know of each other is dying with us,
no one else will ever know
and still we can't convey
to one another the past events
to live them over with a change
in sight of our eternity.

Did I mean you harm
when we lived together?
Did you mean me to be a nightmare
in your life?

© BOA Editions, Ltd 1999

Available editions:
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Cloth ISBN: 1-880238-77-2
Price: $21.95
Publishing Date: September 1999
Paperback ISBN: 1-880238-78-0
Price: $12.50
Publishing Date: September 1999

FormatPaperback , Hardcover

Publication DateSeptember 1, 1999

ISBN1-880238-78-0

From $12.50

About the Author

David Ignatow (1914-1997) was the author of more than 25 books including Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems (BOA 1999) and At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties (BOA 1998). Ignatow’s many honors include a Bollingen Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, the John Steinbeck Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award “for a lifetime of creative effort.” He also received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Frost Medal, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. During his literary career, Ignatow worked as an editor of American Poetry Review, Analytic, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Chelsea Magazine, and as poetry editor of The Nation.