The Song of Songs has never lacked for conversation partners. As metaphorically lush poetry, it has been fertile ground for allegorical readings as well as for comparative work with love poetry broadly, ancient and modern. Its uniquely prominent female figure has attracted feminist critics, both those who wish to uphold it as the salvific text for an otherwise androcentric canon and those who accuse it of many of the same gender troubles that plague the rest of the Bible. In short, it is rare to come across a new perspective on the Song of Songs. And yet, Elaine James's monograph, Landscapes of the Song of Songs, is just that. Through a thoughtful blend of critical theory and careful readings, James provides refreshing new insight into the Song of Songs, focused on the treatment and representation of landscape.

Despite the poem's detailed attention to the lovers’ world, from lush garden to nighttime city streets, James establishes that in the interpretive history of the Song of Songs scholarly attention is too often diverted elsewhere (3–6). Whether readers are focused on discovering the allegorical or erotic meaning behind an image, landscapes seem to serve only as “vehicles” for these readings and are rarely “the object of interest” (6). James's work aims to fill this lacuna through a landscape approach to the Song. This approach, carefully constructed in conversation with theory on landscape (in various media and forms), space and place, agrarianism, urbanism, gender and the gaze, and poetry, begins from the understanding that “landscape fundamentally forms human experience” (2). This formation, however, works both ways: while people have an impact on their landscape, landscape shapes its inhabitants’ culture, values, and imagination. As a result, a text's conceptualization of landscape is an important cultural artifact and should not be ignored as mere backdrop. James insists, therefore, that the Song's “landscapes are ethically charged poetic creations that draw the reader into its meditation on the human place in the natural world” (2).

Equipped with this landscape approach introduced in the first chapter (but further developed and honed throughout the book) James divides her work on the Song according to its different landscapes. She focuses on the agrarian landscape of Song 1:5–8 and 7:11–14 (MT; 10–13 Eng) in chapter 2; the garden of Song 4:12–5:1 in chapter 3; the cityscape of Song 3:1–5 and 5:2–8, as well as the citification of the woman's body in Song 4:4, 6:4, 7:4, and 8:8–10 in chapter 4; and lastly the descriptive poems of the young woman, which James identifies as maps, in Song 4:1–7, 6:4–7, and 7:1–7 in chapter 5. Each chapter offers close and careful readings of the landscapes as described by the Song. She bolsters her analysis not only by engagement with modern critical theory, but also by drawing on archaeological data and comparison with the art and poetry of the ancient Near East.

The real strength of this work lies in this detailed textual analysis. As a result of careful attention to lyric features (e.g., repetition, soundplay, structure, etc.), imagery, and perspective in the Song, James's readings are as insightful and poetic as the texts under examination. James demonstrates throughout the book that a landscape approach brings to the Song a fresh perspective that is still grounded in historical critical methods. For example, James pushes back against the notion that the Song represents a sharp dichotomy between nature and culture (an assumption for many and an assertion by some who have worked on the Song) by demonstrating how a garden is “a cultural form that serves as a microcosm for ideals about the natural world” (59). In other words, the garden is an art form that relies on both nature and culture for its existence. This is apparent in the carefully ordered and exotic garden of the Song of Songs (4:12–5:1), demonstrating the need for a talented and diligent gardener, but which also relies on the larger ecosystem to provide wind and water, forces outside of human control (69–80). Drawing on garden theory and evidence of gardens—of rulers and of commoners—from the ancient Near East, James successfully illuminates the garden of the Song without reducing it to limited binaries or the mere “decorative” side of an erotic metaphor. In many ways, then, James's analysis mirrors her own interpretation of the presentation of landscapes in the Song of Songs—both intimately detailed and panoramic in its use of theory and comparative materials.

This work not only provides close readings of the Song and its landscapes, it also suggests new implications for reading the Song of Songs in our contemporary world. James begins her study by reflecting on “the current ethical imperative of the ecological crisis” and identifying this work as a contribution to the growing scholarly “attention to the Bible's rich imaginary of the non-human world” (1). James argues that the Song can be an “ethical resource” for our ecological crisis and that her landscape approach is particularly beneficial for this purpose in that it is “humanistic (though not anthropocentric)” and that it resists reading landscape through the lenses of inflexible binaries (e.g., nature-culture, public-private, male-female, etc.) (21). This ethical thread runs throughout the work, especially in James's repeated attention to the concept of flourishing and human care of landscape; however, it remains in the background, perhaps underdeveloped for those readers who are seeking the ethical apparatus in particular. This is not to say that Landscapes does not achieve what it sets out to do. James articulates her contribution as a consideration of “how the Song imagines the human place in the landscape,” and this is done thoroughly (1, emphasis mine). James's primary concern, after all, is the Song's own imaginative work, its poetic creations of landscape and love.

What James offers, then, is a resource both for ethicists wishing to construct a biblical ecological position as well as (indeed rather more) for those who want to understand the Song's poetry and perspectives in a clearer historical light. James has framed her work in a way that is compelling for a modern audience beyond biblical scholars. She demonstrates that there is something at stake for contemporary readers of this ancient text beyond good biblical sex and the (im)possibility of gender equality in the Bible.