It is usually wise to be sceptical when told by a publisher's blurb that a book provides a “major re-assessment” of its subject. David Herd's excellent collection of new essays on poet Charles Olson, Contemporary Olson, however, thoroughly lives up to this claim. Not only is it cleanly and brilliantly edited, but its essays cast new light on Olson's legacy and point up the importance of his poetry and thinking to the contemporary moment. Olson emerges from these essays as a poet of major importance and influence in post-World War II America. The book brings the urgencies of his intellectual and cultural commitments, as well as the power of his poetry, into sharp focus and thus offers a thoroughgoing relocation of Olson that argues for, as the “Introduction” has it, seeing him as “necessary reading in our own politically and economically conflicted moment” (3). For a poet so fascinated with history and space (the famous opening words of his study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael (1947), are “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America”), such a resituating of Olson is a powerful (and major) reclaiming of him for our times.

A real strength of Contemporary Olson – and one reason it is so successful in making a coherent and lucid argument about Olson's importance – is the consistent quality of its essays. All the essays are uniformly excellent; and each one adds something new and fascinating to our knowledge and understanding of Olson. The book consists of twenty-three essays, arranged into five thematic sections (“Knowledge,” “Poetics,” “Gender,” “History,” and “Space”), and David Herd's exemplary editing of it is apparent throughout. This allows the book to fully exemplify one of its key arguments, namely that Olson criticism must have (because of Olson's insistence on a poetics of reciprocity and interrelatedness) “the question of dialogue at its heart” (13). It also means that there is a strong sense of resonance between and across the individual essays, which have been carefully set in neat, telling and expressive dialogue with each other. Olson's work and legacy is notoriously “difficult” (though Iain Sinclair, recalling a comment by J. H. Prynne, notes that Olson's “epic,” Maximus, is “a simple poem coming from a complicated man” (300)), and the essays here do not shy away from confronting this difficulty. Contemporary Olson, however, has a clarity of purpose and argument rare for such an essay collection, and this helps it illuminate such difficulties and complexities, and makes it indispensable reading for anyone reading Olson, or looking for clear coordinates in a mapping of contemporary American poetry.

It is difficult, perhaps inadvisable – because of the overall quality of all the essays – to pick out particular essays for comment. However, I want to gesture to some of the essays as means of pointing up three concerns of this book that seem especially compelling. First (and importantly), several of the essays offer a critique of Olson by exposing the gaps and contradictions in his thinking; holding him to account, that is, against our contemporary critical moment. Rachel Blau Du Plessis's exploration of the absence of women's labour in Olson's account of work relations, Anthony Mellors's reading of Olson's poetics as a collapse into totalitarian discourses, and Michael Kindellan's analysis of Olson's “insistence upon compliant reading” (92) all seek – usefully – to read Olson against the grain and to reflect, therefore, upon the gap in power dynamics between what his poetics profess and what they deliver. Will Montgomery's essay, likewise, seeks a nuanced appreciation of Olson, one that is significantly troubled by his poetic “big-man” pose and his consequent legacy for two contemporary female poets, Susan Howe and Redell Olsen. Second, many of the book's essays trouble at the political and ecological significance of Olson's use of “open-field poetics.” In this respect Miriam Nichols's essay is key in seeking to revisit Olson in light of recent ecological thinking. Her analysis of Olson's sense of a phenomenology of knowledge attends keenly to his poetics of “the experience of being in the world” (35) and delivers a powerful ecological reading of his work that doesn't collapse into the platitudes of much recent eco-criticism. Both Tim Woods's and Peter Minter's essays, too, draw out the “poethical” implications of Olson's emphases on embeddedness in local space, whilst David Herd reads Olson as our contemporary because of his concern with questions of “political belonging” (275) and displaced peoples.

And finally, all the essays collected in Contemporary Olson are concerned to chart Olson's peculiarly dynamic (or, as he would have it, “kinetic”) poetic effects. These are traced back (both explicitly and implicitly) throughout this book to the need for the US to reimagine itself after the atrocities and disasters of World War II. Indeed, what this book most powerfully refocusses in thinking about Olson – its strongest new critical intervention – is the way in which he speaks to the contemporary moment as one still working through the aftermath of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the Cold War, of globalized capital, and of recent wars conducted in the name of democracy. In short, this excellent book demonstrates repeatedly that Olson is our contemporary precisely because the delights, complexities and difficulties of his work are necessary to our reading of the intellectual, historical and cultural displacements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.