The introduction and coda to Constance M. Furey's Poetic Relations frame this monograph in questions about the nature of humanity and the function of belief, particularly belief in the divine. Arguing that attitudes towards these essential philosophical questions have shifted since the sixteenth century, Furey challenges several existing ideas about concepts of individuality, authority, self-fashioning, and community in post-Reformation England and America. Four chapters—on authorship, friendship, love, and marriage, respectively—explore poetic representations of intimate, focused relationships. In many instances, these poems depict a connection or desired connection between a human and God, although the relationship may be symbolized through other figures and even other relationships. That Anne Lock, Mary Sidney Herbert, Amelia Lanyer, George Herbert, John Donne, Anne Bradstreet, and Edward Taylor all used poetic imagery to draw connections between physical and spiritual relationships, infusing their works with multiple layers of meaning, is of course well established. Furey specifically invites her readers to consider several new layers of meaning, exploring the relationships her selected poets depict between authors and their readers, between intimate friends, between amorous couples, between historical figures, between humans and the divine, and between almost any combination of the above.

As Furey aptly shows, the act of writing about relationships allows the author to connect to the reader through the shared text. Chapter 1 convincingly challenges the accepted dichotomy between public and private audiences in the Renaissance, calling Mary Sidney Herbert “neither wholly private nor avowedly public” (35) and showing Anne Lock and Amelia Lanyer in a similar light. Psalm translators in particular “embarked on a relationship with God and the original psalmist as well as other readers” (28). Similarly multifaceted relationships—Trinitarian or affiliated with the love triangle—emerge in Chapter 3, where Lanyer's poetry, as Furey shows, invites the reader to become an active participant in the poem, remediating the author's “inadequacies” in the process (118).

Elsewhere, Furey highlights the ways in which writing about relationships can benefit the depicted relationships, as when she describes Edward Taylor's request to be “transformed by grace” as an “interactive process” (147), or George Herbert's growth in “Love Unknown” as a product of “interaction” rather than mere action (83). Each chapter explores the relationships between poets and speakers and God, their texts, their readers, and even some external characters (including earlier poets or translators). In the coda, Furey notes that belief grounded in personal conviction is now expected to precede a religious relationship, while the tensions within these relational lyric poems show a different trajectory, in which writers used lyric poetry to imagine and develop personal relationships even when they struggled with belief. Ultimately Furey concludes that belief is an inherently relational act, and poetry likewise.

Well-researched and grounded in Protestant theology and the Christian liturgy, this book complements cultural and historical claims with detailed close readings of selected poems. Attention is paid to some original features of the early texts, such as the spelling of “partiall,” “generall,” and “liberall” in Donne's “Lover's Infiniteness,” a poem, as Furey notes, that also describes lovers as “one another's all” within a larger paradox about the “simultaneity of distinction and unity” (97). This and some other close readings that draw upon typographical features might have been enriched by a more prominent defense of the base editions chosen, or by discussion of some of the variant texts in transmission around the same time, but Furey's chosen extracts consistently complement rich close readings that in turn provide compelling and detailed textual observations to support her larger arguments.

Many sections here would serve as useful templates for students new to the techniques of close reading; thus, in addition to contributing to the ongoing debates about Renaissance identity, Poetic Relations has wide classroom applications. The book also features a useful range of poets: women are well-represented, particularly in chapter 1; American poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor feature in chapter 4; and the coda on modern secular poet Christian Wiman amply supports Furey's claims about changing attitudes towards belief, divinity, and the relationship between them. This volume may also appeal to non-academic readers from Christian backgrounds, although additional contexts for the featured authors would ease a transition to a popular audience.