SOURCE: A review of Working Papers: Selected Essays and Reviews, in The New York Times Book Review, May 23, 1982, p. 15.

Bruckner is an American journalist, editor, and critic. In the following review, he provides a positive assessment of Working Papers.

"Traditions come and go," Hayden Carruth wrote in 1973; "… they come and go in language. I am making a plea for courage among writers, and for a recognition that the means of poetry are what they are and what they have always been." But language is full of deceits; the temptation is to be dogmatic, "by insisting arbitrarily that part of the truth is the whole of the truth, and by pinning everything on an understanding of terms." Mr. Carruth, who is a poet, is undogmatic and often courageous. One could get the impression that he will find something to praise in any poet. But these reviews, [collected in Working...