Philip Booth should be encouraged; God bless him, he writes like a man. Moreover, he writes like a witty one….

To be sure, there is some chaff in ["Letter from a Distant Land"]. Some of the lines in the poem "Original Sequence," for instance, are simply bad verse…. Again, in "Green Song" … the iambic of the preceding stanzas is violated for the sake of a rhyme. The reader, or speaker, fallen flat on his face over [the] lines, may understand the choice but cannot approve it, particularly when the slightest changes would have made it work both ways.

My guess is that the poor lines are of an earlier vintage, and that so is a certain recurrent tendency to phrase-make … in places that blur the focus of the poem as a whole.

If I had more space, I would give it to the lovely lyrics, "Siasconset Song," "Instruction in the Art," and "Identification." They are the work of a poet. (p. 19)