Philip Booth, 81; poet focused on New England themes

Philip Booth, 81, a longtime Syracuse University professor whose poetry focused mainly on his native New England, died July 2 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease in Hanover, N.H., his family said.

Booth, who studied with Robert Frost at Dartmouth College and was a prominent member of a literary circle in Castine, Maine, explored New England themes with a native son’s understanding of the landscape and coastline. His sparse style combined Down East Maine economy and naturalistic rhythms.

“After work, splitting birch by the light outside his back door, a man in Maine thinks what his father told him, splitting outside this same back door,” he wrote in the poem “A Man in Maine.”

Booth was born Oct. 8, 1925, in Hanover, where his father taught at Dartmouth. The family spent summers in Castine.

After serving in the Army Air Forces in World War II, Booth earned a bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth and a master’s at Columbia University. He taught at Dartmouth and then at Wellesley College in the 1950s. In the 1960s, he moved to Syracuse, where he became poet in residence and co-founded the graduate program in creative writing.

His books of poetry included “The Islanders,” “Weathers and Edges” and “Letter From a Distant Land.” He also published in magazines, including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and American Poetry Review.

In the 1980s, the Booths moved to the Castine home where he had spent summers as a boy and where five generations of his mother’s family had lived. His wife, Margaret, said the couple moved into an assisted living community in Hanover in 2002.