Reviews for Life around Us: Selected Poems on Nature

The average rating for Life around Us: Selected Poems on Nature based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-27 00:00:00 Michael Malecka 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-01 00:00:00 Renate Hausmann 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.