Charles Tomlinson's Some Americans was an unusual book, combining memoir and the detailed and intimate critical reading of poets he admires. He writes as a poet reading poets and learns less by analysis than by empathy. Thus William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky and Marianne Moore come alive as poets and as presences in their world and in his. So too does the painter Georgia O'Keefe.

Some Americans is combined here with other essays by Tomlinson, on Elizabeth Bishop, for example, and on Wallace Stevens who was so important to his early work. Tomlinson was one of the first modern English poets to enjoy and assimilate the possibilities offered by American poetry. Here he reveals how and why. A 'trans-cultural element' has always been natural to Tomlinson; his intimate knowledge of French, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Latin-American poetry has informed his poetry and his readership for many years. The debts to American poetry are 'trans-cultural', too, extending the possibilities of the poetic art.