WEATHERS AND EDGES.

By PhilipBooth '47. New York: The Viking Press,1966. 65 pp. $4.50.

These are fine poems - finely controlled, finely disciplined, finely realized. While reading them, I thought of a statement Thoreau once made. "A sentence," he said, "should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrough deep and straight to the end." Philip Booth could, I think, draw the kind of furrough that would have pleased Henry Thoreau.

Especially remarkable is the quiet and determined power of these poems. Booth holds his reader with the force of his essential honesty. He insists always on seeing the thing as it really is; and, through direct, unadorned language and familiar, yet vivid, images (sea, rock, river, sun, tree, wind), he brings the reader into the intensity of his vision. There is no waste here, no pretentiousness, no awkward striving for effect. Highly concentrated, these poems derive much of their force from their being so tightly coiled.

Although the poems in this book are varied in content, most seem to begin (but not to end) in those "spots of time" that have mattered to the poet - mattered for various reasons, perhaps, not the least of which is that they have furnished materials for poetry. Well, the poet's experience is significant if he can make it so, and that, surely, is part of his task: "the Time Being to redeem from insignificance," as Auden put it. However unique the origins of these poems may be, their concern is with the universality of experience.

It is as difficult to quote from Booth as from Donne, for in poetry as compressed and as closely woven as this, one can seldom isolate lines or even stanzas: the parts have no meaning away from the rest of the poem, and they may even appear unintelligible. The basic unit is the poem itself. For an example of Booth's work, then, I quote one poem, the shortest in the book; its title, "A Refusal of Still Perfections":

That bare farm stripped of summer drifts in my sleep. The river below its field is salt, tidal, and blue.

I own how that farm rests white on white: barn on house on snow.

But I know I can never live there.

Never, for pasture, mortgage the river, or pawn dark hopes to insure fresh sleep.

The fence behind me casts tidal shadows.

I wake to mornings I'd better keep.

Department of EnglishUniversity of Massachusetts