front cover of Talking Together
Talking Together
Letters of David Ignatow, 1946-1990
David Ignatow; Selected, Edited and Introduced by Gary Pacernick
University of Alabama Press, 1992
In his letters, David Ignatow finds company and shares the news with them and now, with us, his new company of readers
 
The letters of David Ignatow reveal the poet in “company” with a community of writers as he shares with them the details and nuances of his everyday existence: the key acts of friendship and enmity, of good news and bad, of struggle, work, success, and failure that comprise a life devoted to making art. The letters also serve as a vehicle for Ignatow to express his views on a whole range of issues from writing, teaching, and editing poetry, to his visions of the self, death and the cosmos. But the key is “company”—the support system that helps sustain the poet and that enables him to help others.
 
One of the many things we may learn from the letters of David Ignatow is the power of the individual to affect another’s life, to help sustain and even change it.
 
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Under Review
Further Writings on Writers, 1946-1990
Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1994
"A splendid book. I cannot think of one so calculated to delight, intrigue, beguile, and inform. To pick up and browse through it . . . is like meeting some venerable old man of letters comfortably ensconced in his library, only to ready to reveal some pear of humor or wisdom about each of the writers he has chosen to deal with."—Kate Wharton, Evening Standard

"Powell is one of the great novelists of our time, much more interested in other people than in his own views and ideas. The result is that his extraordinary richness of act and detail also embodies a far more arresting and penetrating quantity of critical judgements on books, authors, fashions, developments, than are to be found in the theoretical pronouncement of modern academic criticism."—John Bayley, The Sunday Times

"These delightful reviews could be said to amount to a latter-day Brief Lives."—David Plante, Times Literary Supplement

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