SOURCE: "Lynn Riggs's Poems," in The New Republic, Vol. LXV, No. 833, November 19, 1930, p. 25.

Zabel was a distinguished American poet, critic, and editor of Poetry magazine. The following is his positive assessment of The Iron Dish.

The poems in Lynn Riggs's [The Iron Dish] fall into two groups, one of which is concerned with "this sharp incredible beauty" of which he speaks too often, the other with "the yellow calendulas and sun-baked patios of southern California and New Mexico" which his publishers advertise as his native heritage, but which he employs altogether too little. In his highly decorative celebrations of beauty, Mr. Riggs is not easy to distinguish from five or six other young poets whose shining images have soon degenerated into a kind of lyric confectionery—brilliant, polished, but devoid of tone and, despite its neat epigrams, notably weak in concepts. The values and limitations of this type...