[Letter from a Distant Land] displayed mature craft, but these were green songs: poems of a son, of the turning years, of optimistic beginnings. Several times Booth significantly invoked the image of Adam. The general impression was one of light: dawn, April, promise. In the five volumes to follow, Booth's vision has been darkening. (p. 617)

All of which is preparation for Before Sleep, Booth's new and darkest book, a cycle confronting age, losses, sorrows, and emptiness. Before Sleep is a series of articles of belief in which the poet rehearses his mortality. These poems are provisions, stays against finality, as well as proofs of existence in this world. The title inevitably recalls Frost's famous final couplet from "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," with its shimmerings of earthly obligations and heavenly anticipations. Which is precisely Booth's point. His work has progressed from expectation to obligation, from celebrations of life to cerebrations of life herafter.

Early Booth trafficked in nature, the sea and the air. He sometimes wrote as if the proper studies of mankind were fishing, hunting and flying. The new volume focusses particularly upon the 136-year-old family house in which the poet now lives and writes. He gives us an asymptotic phenomenology of thresholds, doorways, halls and rooms—indicative of the narrowing of focus, domestication and inwardness of the poet's later concerns. The greater world is pushed aside for nearer realities of family, history, blood, ponderations of achievements and failures. Rather than attempt to disarm us with naked "confessions," he disarms and confronts his own naked humanity. Overall there prevails a longing for ritual.

Booth's book of change and becoming is uniquely structured. Its forty-three poems are counterpointed by an interspersed sequence of poetic jottings he calls "Night Notes." These underscore the book's heavy themes in a lighter vein, and objectively dramatize the longer poems' introspection. Their brevity is extreme in Booth's canon, though he always has displayed a preference for the fragment rather than the monument. The short length is best for Booth's poems. Their long-suit is their immediacy; their rhythmic enterprise is cadences of human breath. With bright particularity of diction, Booth also finds ways to handle verse without abandoning conversation…. One reason Booth wears so well is, his language is always from living speech rather than from the dictionary. Booth is a parsimonious poet (a parsimonious person, too, apparently—writing about such practises of New England thrift as turning shirt collars and saving buttons). Not for him are the refinements and extravagances of subject and rhetoric of Hecht, Merrill, or Hollander.

Previously his pared-down language evolved until it became full of the tensions of negativity—irony, with enjambment shoring up the poems' energy. He is master of the right-hand margin, never relinquishing a line's energy until it informs its successor. (An enjambment such as "beneath the breaking wave / of summer" gives us successively a breaking ocean wave and summer's heat in one near-ideogrammatic figure.) There are fewer such startling breaks in the new book, and Booth also seems to have relinquished puns. These poems seem to seek instead new ambiguities that are exactly balanced, as in the pairing of "nowhere/better," which seems, momentarily, to imply no place, possibly no place finer, and equally, none any less dull than this. While Booth's language is plain, it also often is specialized, as in his new poems on wood-working and boat-building. Words such as "scarfing" and "rabbeting" give texture to a poem the way grain does to wood, and lend immediacy and authenticity.

Besides personal and familial losses and gains, Booth catalogues the deaths of colleagues and friends. Of all the elegies to Robert Lowell's memory, Booth's seems the most deeply felt. (pp. 617-18)

Before Sleep is a post-midlife crisis book. The protagonist has come to terms with his mortality and time's irreversibility. He is a survivor. In "Not to Tell Lies," "Words for the Room," "Recall," "Still Life," "Sorting It Out," "Generation," and the quintessential Booth poem, "Fog", the poet earns—rather than merely surrenders to—the inescapable leap into spirit. There is something here of the serenity and illumination of the late poems of Yeats and Rilke. (p. 619)