Philip Booth's third book of poems ["Weathers and Edges"] will confirm all his old admirers and earn him many new ones. As the title indicates, the poems concern the weathers, internal and external, of the landsman as he gazes seaward. The developing sequence moves from land to sea, from the artificial complexities of contemporary society to the self's confrontation with its elemental destiny.

So the first poem in the book, "Choosing a Homesite," satirizes the efforts of a citizen to stake out a place of his own beyond the collectivized destructiveness of the moneyed and military powers….

But social criticism is not Mr. Booth's natural bent. His irony is more tragic than satiric. His characteristic note is a stoic and muted lament for lost innocence and an unblinking insistence upon facing the doom that follows the loss of innocence….

This is, first and last, the sea's book, and the best poems depict individuals strong enough to reside fearlessly in themselves as they meet the sea. "Five Ways of Facing the Deep," perhaps the finest poems in the book, hail five such men, including three New England artists, Andrew Wyeth, William Thon, and John Marin.

Always against those who have sold out to the false protection of organized self-delusion are the lone and brave ones who choose the untamed as their challenge and element….

[Philip Booth,] like Melville, views nature, and especially the sea as that inscrutability in which man must trace his course if he is to contend with reality at all.

Again as with Melville, this sense of things isolates the individual in his own quandary. The titles of Mr. Booth's other books specify that, for him at least, consciousness turns us into "Islanders," and that his poems are therefore "Letters from a Distant Land."

These sad and elegaic poems are written with a terse, tight-lipped New England quality stripped of dramatics or histrionics. The images are cleanly and sharply sketched; the lines are hard-packed with sound; the diction is effective in its directness, so that seemingly flat statements resonate.

Granite-gray and granite-strong, the best of these poems have a resistant and resilient compactness which dares the sea's weathers as it mourns the sea's inescapability. No praise would probably please Mr. Booth more than for us to say of his poems, as he does of Marin's watercolors, that they are, in the strict illumination of their "dark light," "more Maine / than Maine."