Remembering a Maine poet

Maine lost an extraordinary poet last week, whose work captures life on the Maine coast arguably better than anyone, and there’s stiff competition in that regard, given the writings of such Pulitzer Prize-winning poets as Richard Eberhart and Robert Lowell, among others. A longtime resident of Castine, Philip Booth died at the age of 81, and his work deserves to be examined again, now that his life is complete.

Always accessible, his poetry reflects the precision of his craftsmanship and his love of Maine – its coast, life along that coast, and the people who make their living by the sea. In many ways, his poetry had more in common with the boatbuilders, lobstermen and local storytellers, whom he so greatly admired, than with the university professors with whom he earned his living. As he wrote in “Builder”:

A stump of a man, Mace works wood:

a pine block first, whittled and shaped

to a model half-hull. “Now you take

the old Annie Gott,” he says. He carves

the memory out, pine-chip and spit-

to-windward, lugging full sail, by eye.

I learned of Philip Booth’s love of the Maine coast firsthand, when he agreed many summers ago to teach a group of five promising teenage sailors in Castine the advanced skills needed for successful sailing along the Maine coast. We studied diligently and enthusiastically, and, when the course was complete, he flunked us all. Our failing was not that we weren’t technically proficient (we were really quite good); he failed us because we weren’t “observant enough.”

During the final exam, he had unrolled a chart of Penobscot Bay (Chart 1203, to be exact) and had pointed to two spots on the coast. “If you were surrounded by fog, and the fog lifted here and here,” he had asked, pointing twice, “what would you see?” None of us knew. (The correct answers were: an osprey nest and a large windowed porch on a house perched on a cliff.)

Strangely, despite our effort, none of us minded or protested. He was setting a high standard and challenging us to reach it, knowing that we could. He was saying that to be a truly good sailor you not only had to master the skills of sailing but demonstrate a keen appreciation of your surroundings. He had so much respect for the coast – its beauty and its sometimes unforgiving elements – that he wouldn’t accredit us until we had learned to appreciate it just as much.

Later that summer, after a successful two-day sail in what became some particularly difficult weather, he announced that we had all passed and would not have to take the test again. We had learned our lesson, and it had changed how we all looked at the coast.

In “Chart 1203” (a poem that, we later realized, had foreshadowed his exam precisely), he wrote: “he pilots best who feels the coast for standpipe, spire, tower, or stack, who owns local knowledge of shoal or ledge, whose salt nose smells the spruce shore.”

Many years later, in Washington, D.C., I was talking with former presidential candidate and then-U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy about a time when I had driven him, fresh off the campaign trail, around Castine in a stalling, sputtering 25-year-old Chevrolet. He thought about it for a moment and said, “That car reminded me of a Philip Booth poem.” The poem, “Maine”, begins:

When old cars get retired, they go to Maine.

Thick as crows in backlots off the blacktop,

East of Bucksport, down the washboard

from Penobscot to Castine,

they graze behind frame barns: a Ford

turned tractor, Hudsons chopped to half-ton

trucks, and Chevy panels, jacked up,

tireless, geared to saw a cord of wood.

It was cruelly ironic that, in his final years, Philip Booth had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, unable to make sense of the very same words that he had crafted so exquisitely throughout most of his life. But the words live on in his poetry – one collection of which is still in print, while others are available online. And his admonition about the Maine coast is as timely as ever. Be observant; appreciate it, and you will always know where you are.

Henry L. Miller, chief operating officer of Goodman Media International, spent many summers as a youth in Castine.