Book excerpt: This book distils an adult lifetime into the intense magic of poetry. Wallace-Crabbe is a nature poet in the broadest possible sense: his poems, ranging widely in tone and subject-matter, seek above all to convey the richness and variety of our world, his sense that we are inserted headlong into life' and must make the best of what comes to us. Throughout his work - at times wryly philosophical, at times gently elegiac - Wallace-Crabbe remains passionately committed to his quest, troubling the stubborn world for meaning'.