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.