:<i>The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media</i>

Taken as a whole, The Lyre Book offers a thoroughly documented, eloquently argued account of lyric’s fruitfully fraught material status in an age of mass media. It is difficult to imagine a more helpful text for other scholars embarking on inquiries into modern poetry’s imbrication in modern media. If there is a critique of the book, it might simply be that it is at times almost too well researched and argued. Kilbane’s deep engagement with his secondary sources, whether in text or via footnotes, sometimes distracts from his primary specimens, and a tendency toward new or revised analytical coinages (e.g., speech-music interdiction [49], remedial fantasy [89], latent remediation [92], songwork [134], displaced objecthood [173]) can produce a similar theoretical top-heaviness. But if the book is sometimes dense, it is always rich, thoroughly deserving of the close, patient reading that Kilbane devotes to his own subjects, and a landmark for future work in lyric studies and historical poetics.