Theresa M. Kenney's All Wonders in One Sight: The Christ Child among the Elizabethan and Stuart Poets engages the rhetorical and theological stakes of Nativity poems written by some of the major poets of the seventeenth century in England, including Robert Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, and Richard Crashaw. Establishing Nativity poems as an underexplored grouping of lyric poetry in the period, she asks one initial question of each poem—“Where is the baby?”—so that she can move to “What kind of sign is the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger?” (5). As Kenney admits, this can lead to some obvious and well-established conclusions. Yet Kenney shows that most major poets of the period explored this subject not to create carols, hymns, or liturgical pieces, as in previous centuries, but as studied rhetorical experiments in the lyric mode. Looking for a flesh-and-blood baby—a material presence—in these poems allows Kenney to bring perennial questions of temporal and spatial collapse in the lyric mode into conversation with evolving sixteenth- and seventeenth-century opinions and practices surrounding the Eucharist, the real presence.

Theories of lyric, Renaissance or contemporary, do not undergird Kenney's readings of temporal and spatial collapse. Instead, something closer to Aquinas's idea of concomitance, which Kenney works with in her reading of Southwell's poetry, structures what is possible for seventeenth-century poets in terms of prolepsis and communion with the Christ Child as baby, as divine, and as Eucharist. These poets, as Kenney claims, would have understood that “God himself is participating in the transformation of meaning or sound into grace as the poem is received by the reader” (12). This belief-centered claim distinguishes her work from the recent critical school of incarnational poetics, though she does generously dialogue with the major figures of that school such as Kimberly Johnson, Ryan Netzley, Constance Furey, and Paul Cefalu. Paradoxically, the focus on Nativity poems allows Kenney to develop an argument for a Eucharistic poetics.

All Wonders in One Sight develops across six chronologically ordered chapters to show the development of the Nativity lyric in England. The first chapter, “Sacrament, Time, and Space in the Tudor and Stuart English Nativity Lyric,” serves as an introduction to the key literary historical and theological texts, arguments, and confessional developments. Chapters 2 through 6 engage one poet and his Nativity poem(s), beginning with Robert Southwell's “The Burning Babe,” and moving through Donne's “Nativitie,” Herbert's “Starre,” Milton's “Nativity Ode,” and several of Crashaw's Nativity poems. A conclusion, “The Christ Child: Little Boy Lost” adds Francis Quarles's, Robert Herrick's, and Henry Vaughan's contributions to the Nativity poem genre in order to demonstrate that the actual infant in the manger disappears from Nativity poems after Milton. Kenney acknowledges that Nativity poems associated with the Tribe of Ben will have to wait for further study.

Throughout All Wonders, Kenney propels the chapters forward with deft close readings and clarity in writing. Chapter 3, which focuses on John Donne's poems to the Christ Child in La Corona, carefully tracks both apostrophe and mixed pronoun use to uncover Counter-Reformation devotions to Saint Joseph. According to Kenney, Donne presents here a lyric mode more focused on tranquility, tenderness, and storge (familial love) than on anxiety. In her chapter on Milton's well-known “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,” Kenney concatenates Milton's use of fate, his use of a muse as mediator, and the infant's speechless smile (playing on the etymological connection between fatum and infans, the spoken word and speechlessness) to point to a major change in Nativity lyrics. With Milton, the eternal present and prolepsis give way to linear time, and the second person of the Trinity, while divine, is a child unaware of his fate to suffer and to die.

While the argument may not be broad in scope, All Wonders succeeds in its mission to open a conversation about a subgenre within seventeenth-century lyric poetry. Kenney's focus allows her more ambitious claims regarding poets’ faith in an enfleshed Christ room to breathe without drifting into speculation. The book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of literature, theology, and religious history.