In Lay Studies, Steven Toussaint conducts an impressive range of lyric inventions, pitching his poems to that precarious interval between love and rage. Beneath their formal dexterity and variety, these etudes sustain a continuous meditation on the concords and dissonances of worshipful life in an age dominated by spectacle, violence, and environmental devastation. With great skill and compassion, he depicts scenes of domestic life in his adopted home of New Zealand, a transient year of religious and artistic soul-searching in the United Kingdom, and a growing sense of dislocation from his native United States in the Trump era. These are poems of profound contemplative inwardness, conjuring and conversing with a vast tradition of literature, scholarship, and art. Lay Studies is a powerful collection and a welcome music.
