LIFELINES: Selected Poems 19501999.(Review)(Brief Article)

Philip Booth. Viking, $27.95 (304p) ISBN 0-670-88287-9

Booth (Relations) has spent half a century writing humbly meditative lyrics and quiet, compassionate verse about his life amid the people and sights of coastal Maine. This generous collection offers most of the work from his previous nine books, along with 17 new poems, many of them moving evocations of old age. Booth brings in Maine's ocean, boats, houses, terrain and longtime residents, from lobster traps to "Four straight days/ below zero," to rock-climbers "feeling for handholds... cheek to cold stone," to boat-builders and log-choppers, to the "riptide/ paint" in John Mann's canvases "that, flooding,/ tugs at …