The Poetry of Booth by Philip Booth

First published:Letter from a Distant Land, 1957; The Islanders, 1961; Weathers and Edges, 1966

Critical Evaluation:

Philip Booth is a poet of the world about him. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he does not look at himself, contemplate himself, and then deliver obscure masses of words that have such private meaning as to be largely unintelligible. The reader can know what Booth is writing about and what he means. The poetry is complex only because the world the poet is writing about is complex. Certainly Booth is a poet who wants his poetry to be understood, not simply felt.

As a poet Booth utilizes many aspects of the world about him, the Christian tradition, myth and legend, other persons and their lives, and his own experience. Examples of his use of the scene about him are many in his published volumes. The title poem of LETTER FROM A DISTANT LAND is a Thoreauvian account of his life directed to Henry Thoreau, his “distant kinsman.” Booth reports on himself by looking about him, halfway between an airfield and Walden Pond, as he puts it. Like Thoreau a century before, Booth sees the variety of life in detail: little girls climbing an apple tree, a hen pheasant, a grosbeak in the pine, and airplanes in the sky, jet-powered night-fighters which wing over his home in the dark. Writing about Thoreau’s former hut at Walden Pond, now a public park, he invokes Emerson’s law of compensation for Sunday lovers and comments on beer cans that now float where Thoreau drank from the water of the pond. Other particular instances of his description of scenes familiar to him appear in “Green Song,” “Crossing,” and “Shag,” all in LETTER FROM A DISTANT LAND, and “Jake’s Wharf,” “Convoy,” and “Maine,” in THE ISLANDERS.

The poet’s use of Christian traditions and literature is found in such poems as “Admission of Guilt,” “Adam,” and “Original Sequence,” all in his first-published volume. The last-named poem makes the concept of time one of the consequences of Adam’s transgression. When Eve threw at God’s feet the brown core of the apple she and Adam have eaten, God set time in motion. Booth’s deity is something of a New England farmer, walking on a cool day in His orchard and musing in contemplative pride on ownership, His handiwork, and His apples—Kings, Winesaps, McIntoshes, and Northern Spies.

Booth is often at his best when looking at the experience of others and writing about it, whether writing of persons or animals. An excellent example is “The Lost Boy,” a poem about an eight-year-old who slips off to a marsh with his father’s fishing rod upon a summer afternoon, leaving his parents and a hastily organized search party to hunt for him at dusk. The boy experiences turtles, frogs, bugs, and hunger, as well as rescue by a red helicopter and his father’s sternness. All this becomes a dream for the child and, the following day, a source of schoolboy boasting in the play yard. In “Builder,” in THE ISLANDERS, the reader meets Mace Eaton, who talks and works from November to May, building a boat. The talk is of the sea and Mace’s boat, the Annie Gott, and the work proceeds from a model half-hull through keel, transom, stem, and ribs, to the placing of a last coat of glossy paint upon the hull that will sail steady and true even in a storm. In “Maine” Booth describes how thrifty people in that state employ old auto engines to saw cordwood, drive tractors, propel boats, and even serve as mooring anchors for their boats. But he is writing really about the men, not the old engines they use. In “Big Dog” the poet writes of a sheepdog which leaped out of a barn to the ground eighteen feet below and survived, though bloody at the nose. He writes, in “Ox-Pull: Canaan Fair,” of the animals put in contest with other teams at the fair to show their strength.

At other times the poet writes of himself, from his own experience, as in “Ego,” a poem which reflects the poet and his feelings when he was in the Army Air Force during World War II. Though he was in a ground-crew, signaling the planes to stop on the flight line, he used to revel in the excitement of flying in his imagination. From a later time, when he lived and worked near the land, he writes of his own experiencing of spring, in “Green Song.” Here he tells how he feels the movement of the earth, the plants, the birds, and his relationship in movement to them. A different experience is recorded in “First Lesson.” Here the poet speaks to an infant daughter, giving her a first lesson in living. As he describes it, he looks at the infant, her small head cradled in his hand, and thinks of the life ahead of her; though the child rests now in his arms, she, like everyone, will soon swim through the sea on a journey to her island.

Literal meaning is always present in Booth’s poetry, and it is usually striking in its presentation. His islands are real islands; his wharves are real wharves; his propellers real propellers. When he writes about Matinicus Island he is as careful as a chartmaker to give its location: 68 degrees 55’W—43 degrees 52’N. When he writes about Sable Island he does the same. In “Sable Island” the first stanza is as specific as the title in its description of the sand and the loneliness and the “bones” of wrecked ships. But underneath the literal there is always more, as in all good poetry. The implications are there for the alert and discerning reader, along with the hard facts and the specific imagery.

If there is any difficulty for the reader it is difficulty traceable to language rather than to symbolism. The language, especially in THE ISLANDERS, and the metaphors may be unfamiliar to the reader. In order to experience the poems one must know the language the poet uses and the things he speaks of; the reader must share language and experience with the poet. In “Crossing” there is probably no difficulty, for most people have seen what the poet describes, a freight train of a hundred cars from all over the country, and such terminology as B&O, Pennsy, U.P., Rock Island, and Frisco is common knowledge. But the experience of the poet behind other poems is not so apt to be shared. In “Chart 1203” the very title is a reference to a navigation chart of Penobscot Bay and may be elusive for a reader. Even the diction of “The Round,” a poem listing at least fifty different plants may prove to have little meaning for the reader who knows nothing of common weeds and their names. Yet to use this language and these references is not unfair of the poet. What Booth wants to say in his poetry is thus best said.

Booth has tried not to be obscure, not to be guilty of trying to reach a limited audience only. Readers who sail coastal waterways and know boating will have an advantage, as will those who have lived close to the land and who have read Emerson and Thoreau. But the reader who has not done these can also understand, if but partially, and this understanding is what the poet wants.

Although Booth’s poems have generally appeared first in periodicals, the poems are best read in his three volumes. The poems in each book reinforce one another, give one another a context that heightens experience for the reader and clarifies the patterns of meaning.

As a poet, Booth regards himself and the world as closely related. The poet, for him, is obviously part of the whole, interacting with the other parts, not simply existing outside it or as an observer. Booth does not sentimentalize about existence. His world is not merely one of blue sea and clear skies; it is also a world of rocks, shoals, and fog, where one must listen closely for the signal of the foghorn and be on the watch for shoal water, rocks, and silently floating logs. He sees that the voyage is dangerous as well as pleasant, but all the more challenging for the danger involved.