[Margins] is a "sequence of new and selected poems." It doesn't distinguish which is which except in one instance, so it's not possible to tell how many there are of each without going back to Booth's earlier books. I get the impression that he does too much reshuffling. Nevertheless, I remain an admirer. New and familiar poems loom before me like pieces of granite, solid and full of undiminished fascinations. Booth's poems seem cut from the earth or netted from the sea; they share in depths and mysteries. Poems like "Bolt," "The Day the Tide," and "The Misery of Mechanics" show man hanging on "a strip of blown sand" in the midst of a turbulence that is literal, biblical, unfathomable. Philip Booth's poems are shaped moments of balance, full of abrasions and courage, neither naïve nor foredefeated. (p. 33)