Work to Be Done: Selected Essays and Reviews

Essays and critical writing drawn from a wide-ranging fifty-year career in letters

Drawn from a body of essays and reviews written over the course of nearly fifty years, Work to Be Done showcases both the depth and breadth of Bruce Whiteman’s critical work. Widely published across Canada and the United States, Whiteman is an accomplished poet, translator, and scholar, and his broad interests have never been limited to any one subject area. He moves between classical and contemporary literature, and music, book and literary history, shifting seamlessly from the close reading of a poem to the consideration of the life and oeuvre of an artist.

In these thirty-four selected essays, Whiteman demonstrates the cohesion of his varied body of work, which ranges from essays on such poets as Sappho, Goethe, Samuel Beckett, P.K. Page, Leonard Cohen and Philip Larkin, to insightful readings of the biographers and translators of such great writers as Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust. Work to Be Done is an erudite and eclectic tour of Whiteman’s finest critical investigations.

Bruce Whiteman was a rare book specialist for over thirty years. He worked at McMaster and McGill Universities in Canada, and later ran the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. He is now a poet, translator, and reviewer. He teaches courses in the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto, and for several years was the Poet in Residence at Scattergood Friends School, a Quaker boarding school in Iowa. The final book of his long poem, The Invisible World Is in Decline, was published in 2022.