These poems take readers into the world of Henry David Thoreau and his circle of acquaintances: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott. These poems also bring Thoreau into the present, imagining him as a living entity in our lives-and with him comes a renewed appreciation for the beauty of the world around us, a world in which astonishment animates every moment. To read these poems is to be "nose-deep in life, too busy for the leaving of it.