[Letter from a Distant Land] is all quality. Urgency to communicate a fresh view of human experience, against the local background of seashore and forest, combines happily with honest recognition of a debt—a debt to earlier thinkers and writers.

None of the brash egotism here which led so many poets of the first half of the century to dangle off in space incommunicado. None of the flimsy tricks of the language juggler. Yet original and modern in diction and approach. With a sure, deft hand Philip Booth presents the essence of life as he knows it among the fauna and flora which provided Bryant and Emerson and Lowell with subject and setting.

He fits into the centuries-old tradition of poetry in the English tongue, acknowledging the tie with his predecessors in the fine title poem, a letter to Thoreau….

The admission of roots, of not being completely underived, is a comparatively new, and reassuring, note. Especially when the poem has freshness and vitality.