"Dry mustard with a tinge of dun" might well be used to describe the color of a good deal of the poetry in David Ignatow's Facing the Tree…. Ignatow is a poet with modest ambitions…. Ignatow, born the same year as Berryman and Jarrell, is clearly a poet of a different order. Berryman could not conceivably have written for Ignatow as Ignatow writes in "For John Berryman." The final stanza is compact of fuzzy sentiment, feelings of omnipotence and of self-righteous self-pity…. Yet it is not fair to say of Ignatow that flatness is all. There are poems which clearly establish a slender claim to survival. In "For Marianne Moore" he praises Miss Moore's affirming joy over flowers in her garden not yet named.

                         for though she saw
                 them it was not for her
                   to name them
                   and to lose their life
                   in words.

In such poems as "The Future," "Birds in Winter," and "Autumn," Ignatow's feeling for the mystery of existence does not lose its life in words. (pp. 351-52)