[Philip Booth's "Before Sleep" is impressive.] Mr. Booth's new poems have the uncompromising spareness one expects from him—not minimalism so much as a principled refusal to say more than the occasion warrants. Sometimes, in his determination not to make much of little, he makes little of much—or sometimes just little of little…. (p. 14)

But most of the poems, for all their spareness, have substance enough. The poems concern, as the title suggests, the cares of middle age: the deaths of friends, the decline of one's own body, coming to terms with the inevitability of one's own death. Against these evils the poet invokes the solidity of everyday reality: his house, his marriage, his connection to other lives around him. There are several sharp observations of other people, such as the untitled dialogue about a psychiatrist's suicide, which ends with a friend's sympathetic tribute…. Not many poets could get the voices absolutely right, and yet compress so much meaning into a few colloquial words. (pp. 14, 31)

Mr. Booth's style, reticent though it is, can be very beautiful. (p. 31)