In an 1859 letter, Emily Dickinson describes with compressed force her unbelief in divine benevolence: “God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with him.” Patrick Keane's unconventional new work takes up a range of scientific and theological questions related to Dickinson's “shrewd” treatment of the Almighty. At the center of Keane's discussion is a poem by Dickinson, “Apparently with no Surprise” (1884), in which a flower is “beheaded” by frost with casual cruelty while an “Approving God” looks on. Keane greets the task of interpreting the poem as a social one; he solicits his friends' responses and weaves them liberally into his own discussion. The resulting interpretive tangents supply for both writer and reader what Keane calls the “added enjoyment of not cogitating in isolation” (109).

More than a scholarly monograph on Dickinson's verse, the book touches on a host of issues relevant to the topic of religion and science. Keane looks at Einstein's rejection of the idea of a personal God in favor of Spinoza's identification of God with “the totality of Nature” (46). He then provides a long, heavily footnoted account of today's controversy over the compatibility of evolution and faith, building his discussion around a 2005 New York Times op-ed by cardinal and theologian Christoph Schönborn that envisions nature as purposeful and revealing divine design. The article provoked an outcry from scientists, secularists and atheists, and theologians; they saw the cardinal's statement as a retreat from Pope John Paul's relative open-mindedness to evolution. Keane draws out the competing strains of the argument and his thoroughness is impressive. But some readers may wish the discussion were less detailed and more focussed on Dickinson's work.

This contemporary firestorm is germane to the waning religious climate of the late nineteenth century and Dickinson's own distrust that God oversees nature and human lives. Keane writes that the poet lived in an age “torn by the tension between Romanticism and Realism, faith and science, belief and skepticism: the Age of Darwin and Nietzsche” (175). While Keane shows how Darwin reconfigured the place of humans in nature and cast doubt on an intelligently designed world, one wishes for more insights into the beliefs that his views revolutionized – beliefs Dickinson herself was questioning even before the 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. Keane's discussion would be enriched, for instance, by some discussion of the natural theologian Edward Hitchcock, whose integrated moral and scientific universe defined Dickinson's scientific and religious education. Though she challenges Hitchcock's belief in a loving and involved God, many of her poems work in direct response to his vision.

This exception notwithstanding, Keane proves an inclusive thinker and a deeply perceptive reader. A scholar of Romantic literature, he pairs Dickinson with Wordsworth, whose belief in divine purpose in nature provides an important counterpoint to Dickinson's own skepticism. Keane considers the array of sources and themes that he marshals “mutually illuminating” (18), and though the worthy goal of diverse viewpoints does not absolve the book of its occasional meandering and repetitive moments, it underscores the rich scope of the work and the intellectual curiosity of its author. Keane reveals Dickinson to be not a conventional or a reactionary voice but a poet whose faith and skepticism were, as she herself put it, “nimble.”