Mission Critical

With graduate degrees in English literature and library science, Bruce Whiteman was a rare book specialist for over thirty years, working at McMaster and McGill Universities and later running the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. Throughout his long career as librarian, poet, essayist, and teacher, he has demonstrated a deep love for literature. His new anthology, Work to Be Done, edited by John Metcalf, comprises thirty-four essays that reflect that depth. In them, he discusses poets including Sappho, Goethe, P. K. Page, Walt Whitman, Philip Larkin, and Leonard Cohen. He considers the life and legacy of Beethoven and Flaubert. And he touches upon the biographers and translators of Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust. The lengthy chapters are drawn from Canadian Notes & Queries, The Hudson Review, Rattle, Poetry Canada Review, The Fiddlehead, and The Canadian Forum...