SOURCE: “Lives of the Poets,” in Poetry, Vol. 98, No. 4, July, 1961, pp. 247-48.

In the following excerpt, Mills offers a favorable review of Say Pardon, stating that Ignatow offers a mature, personal verse.

… Mr. Ignatow's Say Pardon is the best of these books if one thinks of the uniform quality of the work: the singularity of the poet's speech and the fulfillment of his themes within its bounds. This is his third collection, which certainly accounts in part for the settled quality of the tone and style. And that tone and style, as well as the material of the poems, appear to be such that we can guess Mr. Ignatow will be content to explore them further, eliciting from their limited circumference all that his sensibilities and humanity can uncover. Like Mr. Dugan, this writer composes a small but tolerable space for himself in the urban world by setting...