Sydney Lea's Such Dancing as We Can is a compendium of one man's ponderings on the events and changes in this world over the course of eighty-one years. Lea has devoted the greater part of those years to poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, but this collection of essays makes clear that other matters-chiefly devotion to wife, children, grandchildren, and a handful of devoted friends and relations-are at very least as important as his art. More accurately, the essays often indicate that without these other affections and bonds, his art would be at best impoverished and more likely nonexistent. Lea's deep knowledge of his beloved northern New England woods plays an essential role in Such Dancing As We Can, but there are other motifs as well. His long-term delight in blues, country and western, rock n roll, and what the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk called Black Classical Music (especially the work of late bop composers and performers like Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Miles Davis and others) informs many of his observations. The book finds genius and inspiration among people and in quarters that many of the nation's elite wouldn't tend to explore. Lea frequently meditates on the issues of race, American exceptionalism, class, privilege, and inequity through his own personal experiences and the experiences of those he has encountered over the last four decades. This is a book written by the hand of a poet, its language often beautifully lyrical and studded by stunning imagery and contemplative metaphor.

It is through the poet's heart that we follow Lea's journey into the mysteries of grace and the small blessings bestowed upon even the humblest life. Lea's gratitude for the life and affections that have been granted to him makes us aware of our own and we share in his humility as he searches through his writing to understand the unknowable and its gifts, which reveal themselves to us through quiet contemplation.