[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 of lyric have been exhibited best by George O'Neil, whose ornate manner is frequently echoed in The Iron Dish:

No jonquil blade is spearing up
Through swollen earth, no silken line
Is laid to indicate a web,
No mouth is moving to a sign.

The brittle stanzes follow a formula which may be fundamentally different from the lyric formula of the 90's, but which provides no surer warrant of sound poetic results. It is to Mr. Riggs's credit that he handles the method with considerable restraint and dexterity, but it is not to his credit that, in employing it, he has rejected a subject matter much closer to his sympathies and better suited to his talents.

Like other young lyrists who appeared on the scene after the wholesale exploitation of American themes a dozen years ago, he has consciously turned away here from his native environmental materials. This rejection of the largely uncritical nationalism of the earlier poets was a prudent reaction, but one wonders if the recent regional verse of Mr. Frost, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate is not a timely hint to the younger men that it will be wise to return to the material of actual environment in their poetry, and to substitute for flimsy imaginative backgrounds the solid properties of real American localities. Few of Mr. Riggs's poems employ his native Southwestern forms, colors and landscapes, but those that do are easily the most convincing and graceful essays in the volume.