I was rather hoping that "American originality" would turn out to be one of those famous oxymorons, like "British cuisine" or "military intelligence", but apparently it's not: in the title essay of this collection of twenty years' worth of prose writings (mostly) about poetry, Glück suggests that originality in the arts in America has to tie into the American imperative of self-creation. Poets have "to break trails, to found dynasties ... to be capable of replication". Whitman, Pound and Dickinson can be revered as founding fathers of one sort or another, but someone like Seamus Heaney would never have done as an American, as Glück considers him inimitable.

The collection continues with a group of other essays on "big topics" in poetry (and a stray 500 words on Thomas Mann, which is all in the magnificently concrete first sentence: "Buddenbrooks ends when there are no men left"). Then there are ten introductions Glück wrote for the winners in "first book" competitions for new poets that she judged, fortunately all well-stuffed with examples so that they make sense as standalone pieces, and finally a small group of slightly more subjective essays on "Revenge", "Estrangement" and "Fear of happiness" in poets.

There's not much clue to Glück herself in these essays, though: a lot of fierce, clear thinking and very pared down prose full of abstract nouns. Blink and you'll have to go back a paragraph to make sense of what you're reading. She approves of poets who go all out in their work, she seems to prefer poems that use complete sentences to sterile grammatical experimentation, and she writes in defence of narrative and humour in lyric verse. She evidently has no time for cliché in her own writing or anyone else's, and she doesn't seem to care much for rhetoric. But the ten introductions cover a very wide range of types of writing, so she clearly values commitment, ability and originality more than conformance to any particular template.

Great critical writing, all about the work with the egos of both the critic and the author firmly relegated to the background. ( )