As Denise Levertov comments in her brief foreword to The Life Around Us, she has “shared with most poets in every time and place an ardent love of what my eyes and other senses revealed to me in the world we call nature. Yet in this selection of sixty-two poems chosen by the author “celebration and fear of loss are necessarily conjoined.” The Life Around Us shows us both the eternal renewal of the natural world and its imperilment: “In these last few decades of the 20th century it has become ever clearer to all thinking people that although we humans are a part of nature ourselves, we have become, in multifarious ways, an increasingly destructive element within it, shaking and breaking ’the great web’—perhaps irremediably.”