… 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 against the monolithic nature of that world the private values of his own speech. His poem Whistle or Hoot states this activity and its meaning metaphorically:

The bird that sings to itself
is never a lonely or a frightened bird;
though if before it were silent,
darting its head for worms
or worrisome matters,
now that it sings to itself
it triumphs, whistle or hoot.

Poetry, in our “civilized” circumstances, is singing to oneself, is in fact a way of survival. Mr. Ignatow's poems display, without exception, a simplicity of language and an irregular prosiness of rhythm that are very much in keeping with the raw stuff of his art—which consists mostly of the happenings, the relationships, the people met in the course of a routine life in the city. Later poems in the book take up religious and moral themes in a vein of gentle Jewish wisdom that make them seem abbreviated counterparts to Bernard Malamud's stories.

The most readily identifiable precursor to the kind of style Mr. Ignatow has evolved is William Carlos Williams, and, indeed, Say Pardon is dedicated in part to that veteran poet. Yet if Mr. Ignatow is attached to the ordinary and the small, and to a compressed poetry of understatement he creates from this material, the resemblance to Williams halts with these few parallel characteristics. Mr. Ignatow is very much his own poet. He has the peculiar capacity to turn his reflections on some portion of his working-day experience (he is an office manager in a New York bookbindery) into a short poetic fable:

“THE ERRAND BOY I”

To get quicker through the day
and to bring on night as a blessing,
to lie down in a sleep that is a dream
of completion, he takes up his package
from the floor—he has been ordered
to do so, heavy as it is, his knees weakening
as he walks, one would never know
by his long stride—and carries it
to the other end of the room.

The cumulative effect of the poet's thought and techniques places this seemingly trivial human movement at the edge of the universal, where it hints at the patterns in all our lives. Almost every one of Mr. Ignatow's pieces manages to make its poetry from the apparently dull and prosaic, the commonest emotions, the obvious vices and pieties. It is a measure of his talent and imagination that he can continue to work in the restricted but difficult region he has chosen, avoiding the pitfalls of the banal and achieving the victories he pursues. …