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The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Nature
"I have savored her poems like salt, like honey." ―Sam Hamill, The American Poetry Review 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 “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.”
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1997
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89 people want to read
About the author
Denise Levertov
198 books170 followersAmerican poet Denise Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England. Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, was Welsh. Her father, Paul Levertoff, from Germany migrated to England as a Russian Hassidic Jew, who, after converting to Christianity, became an Anglican parson. At the age of 12, she sent some of her poems to T. S. Eliot, who replied with a two-page letter of encouragement. In 1940, when she was 17, Levertov published her first poem.
During the Blitz, Levertov served in London as a civilian nurse. Her first book, The Double Image, was published six years later. In 1947 she married American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved with him to the United States in the following year. Although Levertov and Goodman would eventually divorce, they had a son, Nickolai, and lived mainly in New York City, summering in Maine. In 1955, she became a naturalized American citizen.
During the 1960s and 70s, Levertov became much more politically active in her life and work. As poetry editor for The Nation, she was able to support and publish the work of feminist and other leftist activist poets. The Vietnam War was an especially important focus of her poetry, which often tried to weave together the personal and political, as in her poem "The Sorrow Dance," which speaks of her sister's death. Also in response to the Vietnam War, Levertov joined the War Resister’s League.
Much of the latter part of Levertov’s life was spent in education. After moving to Massachusetts, Levertov taught at Brandeis University, MIT and Tufts University. On the West Coast, she had a part-time teaching stint at the University of Washington and for 11 years (1982-1993) held a full professorship at Stanford University. In 1984 she received a Litt. D. from Bates College. After retiring from teaching, she traveled for a year doing poetry readings in the U.S. and England.
In 1997, Denise Levertov died at the age of 74 from complications due to lymphoma. She was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Washington.
Levertov wrote and published 20 books of poetry, criticism, translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honors, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
During the Blitz, Levertov served in London as a civilian nurse. Her first book, The Double Image, was published six years later. In 1947 she married American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved with him to the United States in the following year. Although Levertov and Goodman would eventually divorce, they had a son, Nickolai, and lived mainly in New York City, summering in Maine. In 1955, she became a naturalized American citizen.
During the 1960s and 70s, Levertov became much more politically active in her life and work. As poetry editor for The Nation, she was able to support and publish the work of feminist and other leftist activist poets. The Vietnam War was an especially important focus of her poetry, which often tried to weave together the personal and political, as in her poem "The Sorrow Dance," which speaks of her sister's death. Also in response to the Vietnam War, Levertov joined the War Resister’s League.
Much of the latter part of Levertov’s life was spent in education. After moving to Massachusetts, Levertov taught at Brandeis University, MIT and Tufts University. On the West Coast, she had a part-time teaching stint at the University of Washington and for 11 years (1982-1993) held a full professorship at Stanford University. In 1984 she received a Litt. D. from Bates College. After retiring from teaching, she traveled for a year doing poetry readings in the U.S. and England.
In 1997, Denise Levertov died at the age of 74 from complications due to lymphoma. She was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Washington.
Levertov wrote and published 20 books of poetry, criticism, translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honors, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 4, 2017
In 1997, the same year she died, Denise Levertov published two beautiful little collections of poetry ~ The Life Around Us and The Stream and the Sapphire. Both are thematic selections from fifty years of writing. The Life Around Us is nature poetry. The Stream and the Sapphire is religious poetry. These slender pocket paperbacks ~ one green, the other red ~ are treasures to be read again and again.
The Life Around Us is an eclectic collection of 60 poems: some philosophical, some descriptive, some political, some spiritual, some that celebrate the beauty of nature and some that condemn the “destructive construction” of man.
In her Foreword, Levertov describes her motivation for putting together this selection of poems on nature and ecology:
“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’––perhaps irremediably. ”
The idea of our forgotten kinship with nature is best expressed in the philosophical poem, “Sojourns in the Parallel World.” This is the last poem in the book and the one that best sums up the collection as a whole. The parallel world is nature. Levertov describes those rare moments when we become free of “our own obsessions,/our self-concerns” and become part of the world of nature ~ a world which is also our world, though we rarely recognize the fact.
This theme is also apparent in one of my favorite poems, “Come into Animal Presence.”
“Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.
What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence. ”
Each animal has his place in the world, his purpose, that has nothing to do with us. And this is sacred. It has always been sacred. We have just forgotten. But in the presence of animals, we may remember.
In “Creature to Creature,” Levertov finds herself observed by an owl. We typically see ourselves as Self and animals as Other; ourselves as observers and animals as observed. But here, the human and the animal, the woman and the owl, meet as two creatures. It is “a gift from the dusk.”
These poems have a subtle mysticism that becomes more apparent in Levertov’s more spiritual poems. In “Morning Mist,” she perceives the image of God in the “white stillness” of the mist.
“The mountain absent,
a remote folk-memory.
The peninsula
vanished, hill, trees—
gone, shoreline
a rumour.
And we equate
God with these absences—
Deus absconditus.
But God
is imaged
as well or better
in the white stillness
resting everywhere,
giving to all things
an hour of Sabbath,
no leaf stirring,
the hidden places
tranquil in solitude. ”
These are beautiful nature poems ~ gentle, graceful, spiritual ~ but Levertov has a firm voice as well and we hear it in her political poems.
In the powerful poem, “It Should Be Visible,” she demands that we acknowledge the painful truth of what we have done to the Earth. The poem begins with the beautiful image of the Earth seen from space (“sapphire continents,/swirling oceans”), but the Earth only looks beautiful because we cannot see how ugly and rotten we have made it.
“... it should be visible
that great sums of money have been exchanged,
great profits made, workers gainfully employed
to construct destruction, national economies distorted
so that these fires, these wars, may burn
and consume the joy of this one planet.... ”
Levertov pushes our noses into our own mess and forces us to look at it. The language is ruthlessly honest and we deserve every word of it.
In some poems, the environmental theme strikes a softer note, one that arouses sadness rather than anger. “Silent Spring” invokes Rachel Carson’s seminal book. “Protesting at the Nuclear Test Site” describes a desert landscape ravaged by repeated explosions. Poems like these recall to me my college days when I marched for nuclear disarmament and ran an environmental awareness campaign on campus. (How heartbreaking that after all these years these poems are still relevant.)
In “Indian Summer” Levertov describes a beautiful lakeside scene disturbed by the sound of a tape deck coming from a passing car. I know the feeling ~ how the peace of a place can be broken by the intrusion of the human world. But not everything human is intrusive. The lakeside scene “admits/the long and distant old-time wail of a train. ” It is possible to live in harmony with nature.
This beautiful, thoughtful, accessible yet deep little book belongs on every poetry lover’s bookshelf and in every nature lover’s pocket.
The Life Around Us is an eclectic collection of 60 poems: some philosophical, some descriptive, some political, some spiritual, some that celebrate the beauty of nature and some that condemn the “destructive construction” of man.
In her Foreword, Levertov describes her motivation for putting together this selection of poems on nature and ecology:
“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’––perhaps irremediably. ”
The idea of our forgotten kinship with nature is best expressed in the philosophical poem, “Sojourns in the Parallel World.” This is the last poem in the book and the one that best sums up the collection as a whole. The parallel world is nature. Levertov describes those rare moments when we become free of “our own obsessions,/our self-concerns” and become part of the world of nature ~ a world which is also our world, though we rarely recognize the fact.
This theme is also apparent in one of my favorite poems, “Come into Animal Presence.”
“Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.
What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence. ”
Each animal has his place in the world, his purpose, that has nothing to do with us. And this is sacred. It has always been sacred. We have just forgotten. But in the presence of animals, we may remember.
In “Creature to Creature,” Levertov finds herself observed by an owl. We typically see ourselves as Self and animals as Other; ourselves as observers and animals as observed. But here, the human and the animal, the woman and the owl, meet as two creatures. It is “a gift from the dusk.”
These poems have a subtle mysticism that becomes more apparent in Levertov’s more spiritual poems. In “Morning Mist,” she perceives the image of God in the “white stillness” of the mist.
“The mountain absent,
a remote folk-memory.
The peninsula
vanished, hill, trees—
gone, shoreline
a rumour.
And we equate
God with these absences—
Deus absconditus.
But God
is imaged
as well or better
in the white stillness
resting everywhere,
giving to all things
an hour of Sabbath,
no leaf stirring,
the hidden places
tranquil in solitude. ”
These are beautiful nature poems ~ gentle, graceful, spiritual ~ but Levertov has a firm voice as well and we hear it in her political poems.
In the powerful poem, “It Should Be Visible,” she demands that we acknowledge the painful truth of what we have done to the Earth. The poem begins with the beautiful image of the Earth seen from space (“sapphire continents,/swirling oceans”), but the Earth only looks beautiful because we cannot see how ugly and rotten we have made it.
“... it should be visible
that great sums of money have been exchanged,
great profits made, workers gainfully employed
to construct destruction, national economies distorted
so that these fires, these wars, may burn
and consume the joy of this one planet.... ”
Levertov pushes our noses into our own mess and forces us to look at it. The language is ruthlessly honest and we deserve every word of it.
In some poems, the environmental theme strikes a softer note, one that arouses sadness rather than anger. “Silent Spring” invokes Rachel Carson’s seminal book. “Protesting at the Nuclear Test Site” describes a desert landscape ravaged by repeated explosions. Poems like these recall to me my college days when I marched for nuclear disarmament and ran an environmental awareness campaign on campus. (How heartbreaking that after all these years these poems are still relevant.)
In “Indian Summer” Levertov describes a beautiful lakeside scene disturbed by the sound of a tape deck coming from a passing car. I know the feeling ~ how the peace of a place can be broken by the intrusion of the human world. But not everything human is intrusive. The lakeside scene “admits/the long and distant old-time wail of a train. ” It is possible to live in harmony with nature.
This beautiful, thoughtful, accessible yet deep little book belongs on every poetry lover’s bookshelf and in every nature lover’s pocket.
December 2, 2013
LOVE LOVE LOVE
If you like poetry and you like nature, this is a fantastic collection. Denise Levertov has definitely been added to my list of favorite poets.
If you like poetry and you like nature, this is a fantastic collection. Denise Levertov has definitely been added to my list of favorite poets.
January 26, 2023
Wonderful collection. "Down by the lake the sign: / "Swim at your own risk. The lake is polluted."/ Not badly, someone says, blithely irrelevant./ We can avoid looking that way,/ if we choose. That's at our own risk./ Deep underneath remission's fragile peace, / the misshaped cells remain. "
November 14, 2007
Some beautiful poems in here. Very clear. A brilliant one about mining uranium versus leaving it in the ground, as it's often found beneath sacred lands. Interesting!
September 29, 2008
i like her line breaks.
October 17, 2020
171020: quarantine buddy read #22 with Keagan! lots of thoughts on this one... certainly the evolution of a view on nature, with a few unfortunately settler-colonial perspectives (ie “man” as a malignant force; precolonial america as a pristine, untamed, unpeopled wilderness, etc). some interesting views, too (space as a part of nature? protest poetry as ecopoetry?) and i get the sense that she’s trying and just old. technically gorgeous, too, of course. recommended, but not without a critical eye.
November 12, 2020
Just before her death, Levertov published this book, gathering work from her long poetry career, focusing on themes of nature. Levertov looks at nature with a sharp eye, finding beauty, inspiration, and religious salvation among mountains and trees while questioning so-called human progress and its devastating effects. A lovely book.
January 2, 2021
Levertov’s connection to nature, her love of all creatures, permeates these delicate yet powerful poems. Her descriptions of “the mountain” take my heart back to Mt. Rainier.
January 18, 2022
3.5 stars.
December 20, 2024
People are terrible sometimes. But have you ever seen a mountain?
April 27, 2018
I was in love with this collection of nature poems for the first 2/3 of it. Levertov is masterful at building surprising images out of poetry's most common subjects (e.g., "Lumps of snow / are melting in tulip-cups" from "April in Ohio"), and she keeps finding new approaches to describe the natural world: a protest poem here, a meditation here, a set of discrete snapshots here. It was so refreshing to see such a variety of pieces woven together.
Then the final third spoils things: over twenty pages of poems describing mountains in the most generic terms possible. I'm tempted to make a drinking game based on how many times the word "mountain" appears in the first lines of poems in this sequence. It's not even that these poems are bad, because most of them are at least inoffensive; it's that the arrangement of these poems makes reading the collection beyond tedious. These really needed to be spread throughout the books, not chained together.
Then the final third spoils things: over twenty pages of poems describing mountains in the most generic terms possible. I'm tempted to make a drinking game based on how many times the word "mountain" appears in the first lines of poems in this sequence. It's not even that these poems are bad, because most of them are at least inoffensive; it's that the arrangement of these poems makes reading the collection beyond tedious. These really needed to be spread throughout the books, not chained together.
July 7, 2025
Beautiful collection! A mixture of elation and fear. She says of nature: “All my dread and all my longing hope that earth may outwit the huge stupidity of its humans can find their signs and portents here.” Ahhhhhh!
In another poem she refers to nature as “a never-failing principle of joy and purest passion.”
Upon re-reading, I enjoyed these poems just as much as I did the first time.
In another poem she refers to nature as “a never-failing principle of joy and purest passion.”
Upon re-reading, I enjoyed these poems just as much as I did the first time.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews