[Before Sleep] Philip Booth's sixth collection, continues his chiseled-style of poetry…. Booth is a poet of nature's coasts as scripts of knowledge, but [he is] skeptical of answers. He has composed his book as a loose tale of time whose core is the dialectic of death and art's revelations of resistant life…. Essentially a lyric poet, Booth has extended his songs of consolation into contemplation through a shadow-narrative meant to accomodate moments of joy, despair, change and permanence in simultaneous coexistence. The book opposes one skein of poems about the definitive scenes in a man's aging life (houses, weather, fishing, boat-building, writers, friends and loves), generally celebrative of the will to live with brave dignity, to a counter-thread of poems, untitled and irregularly inserted, which consider the everpresent nothing life seems.

Booth writes … [about] the flux of being and the edge of dissolution; he regards life as meaningful only when tested, named, and shaped. This labor is dramatized as the necessary courage to be, as our best answer to contingency…. Elegiac, spare, lucid, Booth always had the imagist's gift to see through the world's rock and face. But with a fictive architecture and argument added, Before Sleep rises to an emblematic depth and finality: one feels the bleak, history-ridden, yet hardy fist of New England life hurting and working on.