THE ISLANDERS.

By Philip Booth '47.New York: Viking, 1961. 79 pp. $3.00.

During the past thirty years the New Criticism has made war on the idea that poetry is integral to life. It has held that a poem is a thing in itself, a unique construction requiring only the study of its own interrelationships. Neither the social and historical conditions of the times nor the biography of the poet were important.

Philip Booth's poems are integral to life and speak an entire personality in connection with men, places, with animals, birds, and the sea. The place is Maine but the state of mind is man. The sense of wholeness one gets from reading this book is gratifying as it is satisfying. These are earthy poems, thoroughly known, felt and communicated, accurate of the sea, of persons, and, more difficult still, of mores and the heart.

Booth's imagination is embedded in reality. He writes of life as it is in known situations, but he penetrates so far into the meaning of life that he sees beyond what he sees, without losing the earthy vision, to suggest the significance of hope, chance, aspiration, necessity, the very possibility of the limitations of the human condition. SableIsland, the last poem, ends

No matter what new disasters to come, you must shape your course into the breakers as though it were the whole world, not just a strip of blown sand you happen to be cast up on.

His wisdom and wit come out in poems like "Maine" and "Convoy"; he has anecdotal poems like "Mores" and "Spit"; telling narratives and descriptions in "Builder" and "Jake's Wharf"; penetrating perceptions in "Matinicus" and "Propeller"; and affords "Notes" at the end which are a model of interest, sense, sensibility, and economy.

Each poem is well made, integral to the others in this second book five years after Philip Booth's first; all of them are integral to Maine as place, yet as take-off to its islands, and these in turn to his mature and humane speculations on life. These are deep poems, stated with apparent grace and ease, a true poetic achievement.