Combine a life-long love of literature, an amateur (loving) interest in and study of Natural History and a professional career in soil conservation, and you will arrive at UNDER FOOT, a book-length series of poems and essays by Stephen Lewandowski. UNDER FOOT has a strong elegiac feel. Lewandowski’s earlier books of poems (there are ten) are about love and nature. Now, UNDER FOOT brings in death as a third great theme. But UNDER FOOT is anything but gloomy. Instead it develops perspectives—some comic, some serious—on this universal theme and necessity. If books can be elemental, UNDER FOOT is compounded of earth and water. It looks and roots down through appearances in a search for meaning, akin to Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer declaration: “What I stand for is what I stand on.” Lewandowski’s poems show us a glimpse of the continuing mysteries right under foot.