To mark the centenary of Sir David Attenborough, The Poetry Archive has gathered a special chorus of poems responding to a life spent in attentive encounter with the living world, curated by Maggie Sullivan.

Attenborough’s work has taught us that attention is a form of care, and that to witness is not a passive act, but one which engenders a sense of duty—reminding us that to describe a world is to accept personal responsibility for it.

These poems move in that spirit. They are restless, reverent, alert. Poems written in the long view of things: where human time is only one rhythm among many, and where language itself becomes a kind of habitat.