Selves

Set against the backdrop of his beloved Maine, Booth's eighth poetry collectionwant a previous title?/not necessary me thinks.gs evokes a world of nameless presences, of invading darkness. Zeros on his car's odometer call to mind "how we've already poisoned the planet . . . wired our lives to suicide bombsis there a line break here?/no.gs ." If there is any redemption, the poet implies, it comes through having loved well and wisely. He writes tenderly, wryly about keeping love alive throughout a long marriage. He evinces compassion for hospital patients, the neglected elderly, a drowned man. A missing glove, yelping seals, a chipmunk stunned by a cat elicit his poetic responses, filigree structures that, at their most intense, achieve a kind of naked, direct diction ("So, there's no way to be sure. Not about much of anything"line breaks?/no.gs ); elsewhere, his imagery is elliptical. Booth is a traveler keenly, almost mystically, aware that "How you get there is where you'll arrive."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This eighth collection by a prize-winning American poet features contemplative poems born of the observant patience of North country life. The best are based on concrete observation: the violence of a small-town high school sporting event, the missing man whose canoe is found but who may well have devised a neat exit from one life into another. Booth's strength is that he speaks of significant issues like the ultimate privacy of suffering, the painful hidden destruction of relationships, the coming of aging and death. Though his often prosaic and abstract language can take on a sameness that seems cloistered, Booth's unwillingness to let description stand as a poem, insistence on theme, and compassion and wonder for the "depths we can't sound/lives for which there is no safe passage" make this a collection many libraries may want to order.
- Bettina Drew, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.