LIFELINES: Selected Poems 1950-1999 by Philip Booth, Viking, New York, 1999, 292 pages, hardback, $29.95.

If Alexander Pope could forgive most 20th century poets’ inability to count, he would, I imagine, greatly admire Philip Booth’s poetry. “Lifelines” contains exquisitely crafted verses that consistently reveal, in a contemporary idiom, what’s often thought, but rarely so well-expressed.

Philip Booth was born in New Hampshire and grew up there and in his family’s house in Castine, where he now lives. He gained national prominence in a career that spans a dozen books, participation in the founding of Syracuse University’s creative writing program, and many honors.

Booth was a student of Robert Frost, a distinction in itself. But while their subject matter coincides in New England landscapes and characters, they are separate poets who lived, in their primes, in different worlds and wrote different poetry. While Frost’s poems often seem to liberate an emotional wildness, the way Michelangelo said he liberated statues from marble, Booth’s poems contain emotions. Both use images from nature to contrast and shape the complexities of their times: Frost in the outgoing energies of modern America; Booth in the alienating welter of the postwar world.

In postwar decades, the world has seemed bewildering, as if careening out of control. The response of some poets of this time has been to calm the chaos by finding introspective shelter. Booth offers such poems as lifelines. With the chaotic world as backdrop, his poems create moments of calm, grant inner reprieves, commiserate sometimes, and disclose simple beauties that can be lived in. Booth uses the prosodic conventions of our day — his lines are usually short, unmetered, rarely rhymed — but they speak crisply and straightforwardly. In “Fog,” rowing becomes a metaphor for disturbing uncertainty:

I can’t see up or out or into; I sit facing backwards,

pulling myself slowly toward the life I’m still trying to get at.

In “Stove,” we get a clear, complex boy’s-eye view of a Maine home:

I wake up in the bed my grand-

mother died in. November rain. The whole house is

cold. …

Small chips of pine from the wood-

shed. Then hardwood kindling. I build it all

into the firebox, on the top of loose wads of last

June’s Bangor News.

Booth’s poems consistently carry this measured tone and meticulous care for imagery. They will hold the attention of all readers, from those who enjoy New England scenery to those who enjoy well-wrought contemporary lines. We should thank the publisher who decided to let “Lifelines” provide this introduction to a life’s work extremely well done.