Work to Be Done

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.

AUTHOR

Bruce Whiteman

Bruce Whiteman is a poet, essayist, and book reviewer. His most recent collection of poetry is The Invisible World Is in Decline, Book IX (ECW Press, 2022). His essays and reviews have appeared widely over the past forty years in journals and newspapers in both Canada and the United States. He has taught at several universities and was the poet in residence at Scattergood Friends School in Iowa for several years. Currently he teaches part-time in the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. Bruce Whiteman lives in Peterborough, Ontario, with his cat, Virgil, a harpsichord, and a Steinway grand piano.

Reviews

Praise for Work to Be Done

“Whiteman has been writing about poetry both internationally and nationally (including for the Star) for 50 years; this collection brings together a selection from the now Peterborough, Ont., resident, ranging from North American poetry to European literary history.”
—Deborah Dundas, Toronto Star

“Divided into five parts, Work to Be Done reveals a mind steeped in the classics, particularly the works of Hesiod, Virgil, and Ovid. The book is rigorous in exercise and academically precise, and it strives for a perspective that sometimes seems Olympian in tone.”
—Keith Garebian, Literary Review of Canada

“Whiteman’s eclectic selection of essays is sure to delight lovers of literary criticism and artistic analysis.”
—Open Book

“Whether it’s the challenges of translating Sappho’s poetry, an evaluation of the life and legacy of iconic figures like Goethe, Beethoven and Flaubert, or the wanting verse of Leonard Cohen, Bruce Whiteman brings not just aesthetic insight but a deep humanism to every subject he writes about. Whiteman is that increasingly rare breed: the well-read critic who brings to the page the deeply considered opinion, rather than the knee-jerk take. Each of these essays and reviews, intelligent but never pretentious, sparkles with the pleasure of revelation.”
—Emily Donaldson

Praise for Bruce Whiteman

“Whiteman engages subject and readers with the phenomenology of existence—specifically, with landscape, music, and love . . . Arresting moments arrive frequently via imagery, then follow with insight . . . Whiteman is aware that the very nature of art is to elicit a reaction, and more importantly to have that reaction be expansive rather than diminishing.”
—Quill & Quire