Philip Booth's ["Letter from a Distant Land"], the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1956, is in some respects a disappointing collection to have been so honored. The quality that marks a good writer's work as unmistakably his own is often lacking here. In its place is a manner that seems imitative, if not indeed imposed by some external canon of style. When Booth is most himself, however, his work is good. He writes with deep affection of the sea, farms and forests—his knowledge of the natural world giving, in such contexts, substance and intensity to his language. His title poem is addressed to Thoreau and Thoreau would have appreciated his "unmown squares of sun," his "dazzled wasps."