SOURCE: “Nothing Hidden,” in The Nation, Vol. 210, 1970, pp. 470, 472-73.

In the following review of Poems, 1934-1969, Mills praises Ignatow for revealing his most personal insights and exhibiting tremendous honesty.

“The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts,” William Carlos Williams once observed. This impressive gathering of thirty-five years of David Ignatow's poems bears out Williams' remark. The important terms—“human value,” “intense vision” and “facts”—are descriptive of the kind of poetry Ignatow has produced so consistently, and too frequently without the recognition won by some of his more celebrated contemporaries.

Nothing is so impressive at first glance about Ignatow's writing—and there are included in the present volume, chronologically arranged, many previously uncollected and unpublished poems—as the unity it possesses, a unity which derives from the emergence of a singular voice, an identifiable poetic personality. One detects changes in this...