The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Ecological Themes (New Directions Paperbook, 843) [Hardcover]

Denise Levertov (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Paperbook, 843 | Publication Date: May 1997

Gathered here in one handy volume are 62 poems about nature and the ecology. But, as the author notes in her preface, these are not all praise-poems"celebration and fear of loss are necessarily conjoined." This compact gift-book will have special appeal to those who love Mother Earth. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The 6:30 Bus, Late May
Against Intrusion
The Almost-island
April In Ohio
At One
The Braiding
Brother Ivy
The Cabbage Field
The Cat As Cat
Ceremonies
Chant: Sunset, Somerville, Late Fall '75
Come Into Animal Presence
Concurrence
Creature To Creature
Effacement
Elusive
Engraved
Flying High
For Instance
Forest Altar, September
From The Train, Eastward
Heights, Depths, Silence, Unceasing Sound Of The Surf
In California: Morning, Evening, Late January
In The Woods
Indian Summer
It Should Be Visible
The Life Around Us
The Life Of Others
Living
Looking Through
Mappemonde
Midsummer Eve
Mirage
Morning Mist
The Mountain Assailed
Open Secret
Pentimento
Praise Of A Palmtree
Presence
Protesting At The Nuclear Test Site
The Reminder
Revivals
A Reward
Salvation
Settling
Silent Spring
Sojourns In The Parallel World
Sound Of The Axe
A South Wind
The Stricken Children
Those Who Want Out
Tragic Error
Urgent Whisper
The Vron Woods (north Wales)
Web
What It Could Be
What One Receives From Living Close To A Lake
Whisper
The Willows Of Massachusetts
Witness
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Hardcover: 77 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (May 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081121351X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811213516
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,552,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Levertov anthology re-collects poems of natural world., January 15, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (South Strafford, Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Ecological Themes (New Directions Paperbook, 843) (Paperback)

Poet Cora Brooks has written, "Forgive these words, they are not birds." Academic philosophers have built careers upon speculations that what most of us call Literature is a falsehood, an intellectual sham or circus trick. Meanwhile, for altogether different reasons, imaginative writers continue to wrestle, as they have always done, with the difficulty of accurately catching in words the dizzying vivaciousness of being alive. A recent book by Denise Levertov celebrates both the effort and joy of reaching with language for a momentary grasp of the "realness" of the natural world - a realm we experience through a perpetually shifting range of sights, sounds, and feelings. Consider the one-line poem of Cora Brooks, one fluent gesture, one rapidly balanced and articulated sentence. The poet concedes the inability of words to embody the actual winged miracles that surround us, yet with equal verve demonstrates how suddenly poetry can penetrate an ordinarily distracted mind. The reader knowledgeable about craft would recognize the phrasing as perfect iambic tetrameter, with a strong and pivotal caesura or pause in the middle, but you don't need to know this to get a rush of sensations from the line. Literary-critical theorizing seems extraneous under the glancing blow of that poem. Denise Levertov, who died in December 1997, was the author of more than twenty books of poems. The longevity and breadth of her influence upon readers and writers since the 1950s has been underscored by poet Kenneth Rexroth, who praised her as "the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving." Levertov's longtime publisher has recently released two pocket-sized, clothbound anthologies drawing upon collections published in all phases of her writing life. [ital] The Life Around Us, which I'll describe here, is thematically organized around poems that meditate upon our relationships with nature. The book is handsomely composed, intended to be carried along like a book of common prayer. As ever in this poet's work, the music is richly detailed, awestruck as well as elegiac. Here is "The Willows of Massachusetts": [indented] Animal willows of November in pelt of gold enduring when all else has let go all ornament and stands naked in the cold. Cold shine of sun on swamp water, cold caress of slant beam on bough, gray light on brown bark. Willows - last to relinquish a leaf, curious, patient, lion-headed, tense with energy, watching the serene cold through a curtain of tarnished strands. Levertov works like a spider, drawing out from within her body lines as fine as gossamer filament, yet resilient and adhesive. Actual spider web is, relative to its breadth, one of the toughest materials on Earth - the same substance enlarged would be stronger than steel cable, capable of spanning bridge supports. Like spider web, by design Levertov's poems are as much a matter of gaps and openings as anchored fibers. And she's as industrious as the prolific orb spinner whose web-works are ripped to tatters and who simply re-commences, because that is her nature and need: [indented] Everything is threatened, but meanwhile everything presents itself: the trees, that day and night steadily stand there, amassing lifetimes and moss, the bushes eager with buds sharp as green pencil-points . . . Her poems can at times seem didactic or excessively emotive, to a degree that evades rather than engulfs the reader, but following the course of Levertov's books for years, one comes over and over to scores of indispensable poems as well as some of the most gorgeous and intricate essays ever written on the tactile craft of writing. These are all the more piercing for originating in an age when the survival of no species or habitat can be taken for granted. As the poet observes in her foreword to [ital] The Life Around Us, "In these last few decades of the twentieth 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.' So a poet, although often impelled . . . to write poems of pure celebration, is driven inevitably to lament, to anger, and to the expression of dread." An artist as consummately confident as Levertov tends not to despair at the distance between word and world, but instead uses every resource at hand so as to completely inhabit the interval itself.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful. Best Modern Poetry I've read., March 4, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Ecological Themes (New Directions Paperbook, 843) (Paperback)

I was delighted with this little book of poems on nature. I enjoy her writing style and her imagery. Each poem is a little gem, and I haven't felt that way about poems for awhile.