Philip Booth is the archetype of the conservative younger poet. Matter and manner are derived from Robert Frost, and he has successfully reproduced Frost's wry music. "Choosing a Homesite," the first poem in Weathers and Edges, shows him at his best. Here he evokes the creeping industrialization of the American landscape in lines whose graceful, over-and-under movement keeps dipping in and out of commercial jargon.

Unfortunately, the very next poem, "Incident in Santo Domingo," is a little anthology of Booth's commonest faults, such as trying to enliven a dully reportorial passage with a few calculating vulgarities … and unnecessary coinages…. His irony is often heavy-handed…. Yet all this might be acceptable if we could feel the necessity behind the poem. It remains a set-piece, battening on the day's headlines and everybody's hatred of war. In short, what Auden has called "a poem written merely for the sake of writing some poem."…

[After] a while our attention begins to wander.

It wanders too when Mr. Booth begins talking about the weather or his beloved Maine islands merely to lure us down familiar metaphysical paths. Rare is the grain of sand in which he can't spot the world; seagulls, dories, and schools of herring are likewise windows giving on eternity, until we begin to suspect that he is in direct, hot-line communication with it. (p. 2)