Norbert Hummelt has received great recognition for his various poetry collections published since 1993; in 2018, he was awarded the Hölty Prize, the most prestigious award for lyrical work in the German-speaking world. A year earlier, he was also introduced as a skilled prose author when his travel writings "The Atlas of Memory" were published in a collected edition by Nimbus. Now we can also present him as an essayist, who has commented on literature and art in various scattered places for many years—primarily focusing on poetry, his true domain. The texts reveal the wide-ranging educational background from which Hummelt draws for his work; the essays trace back to Baroque literature, have a focus on Romanticism, frequently revolve around Stefan George and Gottfried Benn, traverse the post-war landscape of Group 47 with Günter Eich and others, dedicate attention to Jürgen Becker, Ernst Jandl, and Friederike Mayröcker, or depict Thomas Kling from recent contemporaneity. It is a very intimate approach that one witnesses here. Hummelt's engagement with "his" authors is not about erudition, but rather about the intensity of reading, the deepening and curious exploration of their world, their language, their form. The title of the book already indicates this: Here, someone is dog-earing the pages of the book—out of enthusiasm, from emotion, as a marking and memory aid, to be able to read and delve into the texts again and again. The aim of all this is consequently not to establish a new canon of what one must know as exemplary knowledge—in fact, Hummelt is not interested in that at all—rather, he is intrigued by the forces of impact, for example, that the songs of Udo Lindenberg possess. At the same time, he is not dismissive of high aspirations, but observes them without premature reverence. Poetry is said to be experiencing a renaissance at present, as is often claimed. In light of the dominance of clichés in...