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Complete Poems
A master of song poems which celebrate—and incarnate—the music of nature and history, love and mythology, religion and language, Basil Bunting (1900-1985) was a major figure in Modernist poetry, recognized by Pound and Zukofsky as early as the 1930s, and crowned, with the 1966 publication of his masterpiece “Briggflatts,” Britain's greatest poet. The poet himself called his great epic poem “old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom,” but for many writers “Briggflatts” is one of the dozen great poems of the 20th century: as Cyril Connolly put it, “the finest long poem to have been published in England since T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.”
As well as “Briggflatts” (long out of print in the US, and now only available in this edition), this new Complete Poems includes Bunting's other great sonatas, most notably Villon (1925) and The Spoils (1951), along with his two books of Odes, his vividly realized “Overdrafts” (as he called his free translations of Horace, Rudaki, and others), and his brilliantly condensed Japanese adaptation, Chomei at Toyama (1932). It also includes his posthumous Uncollected Poems. This centenary edition has an introduction by Richard Caddel, Director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Center at Durham University.
As well as “Briggflatts” (long out of print in the US, and now only available in this edition), this new Complete Poems includes Bunting's other great sonatas, most notably Villon (1925) and The Spoils (1951), along with his two books of Odes, his vividly realized “Overdrafts” (as he called his free translations of Horace, Rudaki, and others), and his brilliantly condensed Japanese adaptation, Chomei at Toyama (1932). It also includes his posthumous Uncollected Poems. This centenary edition has an introduction by Richard Caddel, Director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Center at Durham University.
- GenresPoetryBritish Literature
256 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1994
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About the author
Basil Bunting
43 books37 followersBorn into a Quaker family, Bunting was educated at the Royal Grammar School there for two years. He then studied at two Quaker schools: from 1912–1916 at Ackworth School in Yorkshire and from 1916–1918 at Leighton Park School in Berkshire. His Quaker education strongly influenced his pacifist opposition to World War I, and in 1918 he was arrested as a conscientious objector, serving a sentence of more than a year in Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester prisons. These events were to have an important role in his first major poem, Villon (1925). Villon was one of a rather rare set of complexly structured poems that Bunting labelled "sonatas," thus underlining the sonic qualities of his verse and recalling his love of music. After his release from prison in 1920, traumatized by the time spent in jail, Bunting went to London, where he enrolled in the London School of Economics, and had his first contacts with journalists, social activists and Bohemia. Tradition has it that it was Nina Hamnett who introduced him to the works of Ezra Pound by lending him a copy of Homage to Sextus Propertius. The glamour of the cosmopolitan modernist examples of Nina Hamnett and Mina Loy seems to have influenced Bunting in his later move from London to Paris.
After having travelled in Northern Europe while holding small secretarial jobs in London, Bunting left the London School of Economics without a degree and went to France. There, in 1923, he became friendly with Pound, who years later would dedicate his Guide to Kulchur (1938) to both Bunting and Louis Zukofsky, "strugglers in the desert". Bunting's poetry began to show the influence of this friendship. He visited Pound in Rapallo, Italy, and later settled there with his family from 1931 to 1933. He was published in the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine, in the Objectivist Anthology, and in Pound's Active Anthology. He also worked as a music critic during this time.
During World War II, Bunting served in British Military Intelligence in Persia. After the war, he continued to serve on the British Embassy staff in Tehran until he was expelled by Muhammad Mussadegh in 1952.
Back in Newcastle, he worked as a journalist on the Evening Chronicle until his rediscovery during the 1960s by young poets, notably Tom Pickard, who were interested in working in the modernist tradition. In 1966, he published his major long poem, Briggflatts, named for the Quaker meeting house in Cumbria where he is now buried.
After having travelled in Northern Europe while holding small secretarial jobs in London, Bunting left the London School of Economics without a degree and went to France. There, in 1923, he became friendly with Pound, who years later would dedicate his Guide to Kulchur (1938) to both Bunting and Louis Zukofsky, "strugglers in the desert". Bunting's poetry began to show the influence of this friendship. He visited Pound in Rapallo, Italy, and later settled there with his family from 1931 to 1933. He was published in the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine, in the Objectivist Anthology, and in Pound's Active Anthology. He also worked as a music critic during this time.
During World War II, Bunting served in British Military Intelligence in Persia. After the war, he continued to serve on the British Embassy staff in Tehran until he was expelled by Muhammad Mussadegh in 1952.
Back in Newcastle, he worked as a journalist on the Evening Chronicle until his rediscovery during the 1960s by young poets, notably Tom Pickard, who were interested in working in the modernist tradition. In 1966, he published his major long poem, Briggflatts, named for the Quaker meeting house in Cumbria where he is now buried.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 23, 2010
Basil Bunting: Complete Poems
Associate Editor: Richard Caddel
New Directions Press
239 pp. $ 16.95 paper
Reviewed by Jamey Hecht for American Book Review
http://americanbookreview.org/issueCo...
This new edition of a great Modernist innovator is a gift for the reading public. Everybody who’s ever been changed by Ezra Pound, Eliot, Jeffers, H.D., or even Dylan Thomas will recognize the landscape of this work. Like Pound, Bunting is a floridly learned, serious character. He worked with Pound at Rapallo from 1929 to 1933 (the span from the market crash to the rise of Hitler), cultivating a genuine cosmopolitanism that remained essentially untainted by Pound’s fascist sympathies. In fact, Bunting was so much his own man that Pound’s narcissism and megalomania don’t seem to have held him at all tightly. For instance, in his copy of Guide to Kulchur, on the page where Pound enthusiastically cites Confucius’ motto, ‘I have reduced it all to one principle,’ Bunting commented: ‘A very dangerous and deeply ignorant thing to do: impoverishing language, establishing as real relations merely linguistic.’ Anti-systemic thought pervades the poetry, too. Bunting’s love of local particulars bears a commanding authority in its sad nonchalance, without the pedantry and hectoring of The Wasteland’s footnotes or The Cantos’ encyclopedic sprawl.
The pathos of the transitory arises from Bunting’s thousand evocations of a crumbling British landscape, but it’s even stronger in his commitment to his native Northumbrian dialect. Nobody talks that way anymore; most of the old dialects are gone (like the twenty-two thousand kilometers of England’s hedgerows lost since the end of WWII ). The residual Welsh in Dylan Thomas made for a similar kind of fruitful difficulty. Bunting is hard. But what might seem like obscurantist cleverness turns out to be real memory: as a child in the 20th Century’s first decade, he heard his nurse singing Northumbrian folksongs. That genuine inheritance of a vanishing oral tradition made him an aural poet in a world of silent print, and the verse is full of reminders to heed the music. This is from the poet’s masterwork, the autobiographical longpoem in five parts (plus a coda), Briggflatts:
Flexible, unrepetitive line,
to sing, not paint; sing, sing,
laying the tune on the air,
nimble and easy as a lizard,
still and sudden as a gecko […:]
Instructed to read aloud, we can’t miss the contrast between the voiced sibilants in “easy as a lizard” and the staccato glottal stop in “gecko.” And this is iconicity: the sibilant line is about the moving animal, and the choppy line is about those instantaneous head movements it makes when its body stays put. A few stanzas on, the naturalist’s sight and the speaker’s ear converge again:
It sounds right, spoken on the ridge
between marine olives and hillside
blue figs, under the breeze fresh
with pollen of Apennine sage.
It feels soft, weed thick in the cave
and the smooth wet riddance of Antoinetta’s
bathing suit, mouth ajar for
submarine Amalfitan kisses.
It looks well on the page, but never
well enough. Something is lost […:]
The erotic spell of the “soft” stanza is enhanced by a subtle /th/ sound system, now voiced and now unvoiced, always sounded with the tip of the tongue between the teeth. Bunting knows what he’s doing to the reader’s physical head; despite his pen he seems to compose like an oral poet who has to use phonetics for the induction of a trance in the reader. Plato’s Ion is all about this, a propos of the rhapsodist’s performance of Homer’s hypnotic verbal music. So it’s not altogether surprising to find that Bunting was a music critic in his own right; for most of 1927 he even managed to earn a living that way. Almost half a century later, he taught at the University of Victoria in Canada with the same orientation:
Bunting's method of teaching was simply to read good poetry aloud and, when possible, to have us listen to music. In this he favored Dowland, Byrd and Purcell. I remember him playing a recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations as well, the first time I'd heard it. I believe he thought we might absorb some of the possibilities for rhythm in poetry by keeping our mouths shut and listening. Can you imagine trying to get away with teaching a writing course in this manner now? --- August Kleinzahler, London Review of Books, 29 April 1999.
I’ll leave it to the reader to discover the astonishingly beautiful passages in Briggflatts about the emotions latent in the night sky of the Northern winter. But it’s worth noting that this 20-page poem follows Dante in its cosmic scale, mapping self-experience onto a shared world-picture that ends with the stars. It opens in May and by closure time we’re on a mountain, “watching Capella steer for the zenith.”
Basil Bunting was — like so many of those odd individuals who remain far more influential than the written record shows — a person of conflicting characteristics united by his depth of character. A member of British military intelligence stationed in Tehran during and after WWII, he was not a cynical bastard. Touched by Ezra Pound’s solipsistic intellectual flame, he was not burnt. Wedded to the idiom and idiosyncrasies of Northumberland, his sympathies and learning embraced Italy, Persia, Canada and Japan. Twenty years after his death in 1985, his crucial role in the Modernist movement and the enduring power of his best poetry are only now being appreciated at the level they deserve. This new paperback is a fine instrument for that timely change.
I hope it’s no slight against him to recall his famous stanzas about Pound’s Cantos, this time with the more difficult of Basil Bunting’s own Complete Poems in mind:
There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!
Associate Editor: Richard Caddel
New Directions Press
239 pp. $ 16.95 paper
Reviewed by Jamey Hecht for American Book Review
http://americanbookreview.org/issueCo...
This new edition of a great Modernist innovator is a gift for the reading public. Everybody who’s ever been changed by Ezra Pound, Eliot, Jeffers, H.D., or even Dylan Thomas will recognize the landscape of this work. Like Pound, Bunting is a floridly learned, serious character. He worked with Pound at Rapallo from 1929 to 1933 (the span from the market crash to the rise of Hitler), cultivating a genuine cosmopolitanism that remained essentially untainted by Pound’s fascist sympathies. In fact, Bunting was so much his own man that Pound’s narcissism and megalomania don’t seem to have held him at all tightly. For instance, in his copy of Guide to Kulchur, on the page where Pound enthusiastically cites Confucius’ motto, ‘I have reduced it all to one principle,’ Bunting commented: ‘A very dangerous and deeply ignorant thing to do: impoverishing language, establishing as real relations merely linguistic.’ Anti-systemic thought pervades the poetry, too. Bunting’s love of local particulars bears a commanding authority in its sad nonchalance, without the pedantry and hectoring of The Wasteland’s footnotes or The Cantos’ encyclopedic sprawl.
The pathos of the transitory arises from Bunting’s thousand evocations of a crumbling British landscape, but it’s even stronger in his commitment to his native Northumbrian dialect. Nobody talks that way anymore; most of the old dialects are gone (like the twenty-two thousand kilometers of England’s hedgerows lost since the end of WWII ). The residual Welsh in Dylan Thomas made for a similar kind of fruitful difficulty. Bunting is hard. But what might seem like obscurantist cleverness turns out to be real memory: as a child in the 20th Century’s first decade, he heard his nurse singing Northumbrian folksongs. That genuine inheritance of a vanishing oral tradition made him an aural poet in a world of silent print, and the verse is full of reminders to heed the music. This is from the poet’s masterwork, the autobiographical longpoem in five parts (plus a coda), Briggflatts:
Flexible, unrepetitive line,
to sing, not paint; sing, sing,
laying the tune on the air,
nimble and easy as a lizard,
still and sudden as a gecko […:]
Instructed to read aloud, we can’t miss the contrast between the voiced sibilants in “easy as a lizard” and the staccato glottal stop in “gecko.” And this is iconicity: the sibilant line is about the moving animal, and the choppy line is about those instantaneous head movements it makes when its body stays put. A few stanzas on, the naturalist’s sight and the speaker’s ear converge again:
It sounds right, spoken on the ridge
between marine olives and hillside
blue figs, under the breeze fresh
with pollen of Apennine sage.
It feels soft, weed thick in the cave
and the smooth wet riddance of Antoinetta’s
bathing suit, mouth ajar for
submarine Amalfitan kisses.
It looks well on the page, but never
well enough. Something is lost […:]
The erotic spell of the “soft” stanza is enhanced by a subtle /th/ sound system, now voiced and now unvoiced, always sounded with the tip of the tongue between the teeth. Bunting knows what he’s doing to the reader’s physical head; despite his pen he seems to compose like an oral poet who has to use phonetics for the induction of a trance in the reader. Plato’s Ion is all about this, a propos of the rhapsodist’s performance of Homer’s hypnotic verbal music. So it’s not altogether surprising to find that Bunting was a music critic in his own right; for most of 1927 he even managed to earn a living that way. Almost half a century later, he taught at the University of Victoria in Canada with the same orientation:
Bunting's method of teaching was simply to read good poetry aloud and, when possible, to have us listen to music. In this he favored Dowland, Byrd and Purcell. I remember him playing a recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations as well, the first time I'd heard it. I believe he thought we might absorb some of the possibilities for rhythm in poetry by keeping our mouths shut and listening. Can you imagine trying to get away with teaching a writing course in this manner now? --- August Kleinzahler, London Review of Books, 29 April 1999.
I’ll leave it to the reader to discover the astonishingly beautiful passages in Briggflatts about the emotions latent in the night sky of the Northern winter. But it’s worth noting that this 20-page poem follows Dante in its cosmic scale, mapping self-experience onto a shared world-picture that ends with the stars. It opens in May and by closure time we’re on a mountain, “watching Capella steer for the zenith.”
Basil Bunting was — like so many of those odd individuals who remain far more influential than the written record shows — a person of conflicting characteristics united by his depth of character. A member of British military intelligence stationed in Tehran during and after WWII, he was not a cynical bastard. Touched by Ezra Pound’s solipsistic intellectual flame, he was not burnt. Wedded to the idiom and idiosyncrasies of Northumberland, his sympathies and learning embraced Italy, Persia, Canada and Japan. Twenty years after his death in 1985, his crucial role in the Modernist movement and the enduring power of his best poetry are only now being appreciated at the level they deserve. This new paperback is a fine instrument for that timely change.
I hope it’s no slight against him to recall his famous stanzas about Pound’s Cantos, this time with the more difficult of Basil Bunting’s own Complete Poems in mind:
There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!
March 22, 2021
This is really a review of Bunting's long poem "Briggflatts" disguised as a review of this book in which it can be found. Bunting was a great poet whose poems are all worth reading, but "Briggflatts" was his masterpiece. It's like Eliot's "Wasteland" if Eliot had not been a snob, or like his "Four Quartets" without the religion. It's like Pound's Cantos if Pound hadn't been a little nuts. (Note: I love all those other poets and poems, too. I just like “Briggflatts” best.)
Here's the opening stanza of this very musical and earthy poem. If you have any trouble at all following it, try speaking it aloud.
You can read more about "Briggflatts" in this slightly longer introduction to the poem.
Here's the opening stanza of this very musical and earthy poem. If you have any trouble at all following it, try speaking it aloud.
Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
and through the dale
furrows fill with may,
paving the slowworm’s way.
You can read more about "Briggflatts" in this slightly longer introduction to the poem.
April 2, 2014
Basil Bunting writes interesting poems on very diverse subjects in a readable style. He is labelled a "modernist" poet, greatly influenced by Ezra Pound, and this may be an unhelpful label if it makes people reluctant to turn the pages and give them time to work their magic. He himself could mock modernism - certainly in its musical form:
What a pity that Bela Bartok
Cannot give his smug public a shock
By writing in parts
For the hiccups and farts
And conducting the piece with
He strongly advocated reading his poems aloud and Bloodaxe have released recordings of him reading work from this collection. I have not (yet) encountered them in this form but I suggest that a poet prepared to stand in front of an audience and read their own work is taking a great risk and must have some confidence that they will emerge with dignity. I recall that Bukowsky's idea of hell is to have to listen to other poets reading their work aloud. (Richmal Crompton's William would heartily agree but William would certainly be willing to have a go at reading his own work aloud, as he sometimes did to admiring little girls.) I would suggest that at least these poems differ from Bukowski's (and I fear William's) in being written from an adult rather than adolescent mind set. I do not think they suffer from comparison of style or technique with Bukowski (or William). I think the world Bunting occupies is a far more attractive, civilised, diverse and sane world than the downtown city life of a drunken American.
This volume is "complete" rather than selected, yet it is not unduly lengthy at 238 pages. It is certainly too dense to read through in one session, even spread over a few days, but not because it is a tough read. It is not that. But it is a pity to gallop through without pausing to savour the many pleasures and delights along the way.
The first poem,one of his "Sonatas" titled Villon (who was a French poet and vagabond, 1431 - 1463) amused me at once by selecting the following archaic expression:
"A blazing parchment, / Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold."
It helps to mention that Matthew Paris (1200 to 1259) produced illustrated manuscripts setting out the history of his times at St Albans in England. "Paris his kings" is so much more readable than the modern possessive, especially with the awkward "s" at the end of Paris. Do we write "Paris' Kings" which I think is correct, or "Paris's Kings" which I think is incorrect and disagreeable but somehow more intuitive, and in any case how do we pronounce it? I do not suggest the problem is terribly hard to solve for any reader - only that it exists and leads to a potential stumble while reading. The solution is to my mind perfectly correct and at the same time imaginative and very clever. That possessive apostrophe is not always as helpful as the earlier form and we should use that more.
And Bunting is very clever with language, as shown in his translations of poetry by Horace ...
....who'd risk being bored stiff every night
Lisening to father's sarcasms?...
(Horace)
and by others, such as this Persian poem which is a bit topical for me just now:
When the sword of sixty comes nigh his head
give a man no wine, for he is drunk with years.
Age claps a stick in my bridle-hand:
substance spent, health broken,
forgotten the skill to swerve aside from the joust
with the spearhead grazing my eyelashes.
The sentinel perched on the hill top
cannot see the countless army he used to see there:
the black summit's deep in snow
and its lord himself sinning against the army.
He was proud of his two swift couriers:
lo! sixty ruffians have put them in chains.
The singer is weary of his broken voice,
one drone for the bulbul alike and the lion's grousing.
Alas for flowery, musky sappy thirty
and the sharp Persian sword!
The pheasant strutting about the briar,
pomegranate-blossom and cypress sprig!
Since I raised my glass to fifty-eight
I have toasted only the bier and the burial-ground.
I ask the just Creator
so much refuge from Time
that a tale of mine may remain in the world
from this famous book of the ancients
and they who speak of such matters weighing their words
think of that only when they think of me.
Hakīm Abu'l-Qāsim Ferdowsī Tūsī Firdowsi
(Ferdosi)
But his own poems are no less inspired.
"The mason stirs.
Words!
Pens are too light.
Take a chisel to write."
(Bunting)
In "Chomei At Toyama" Bunting produces a very pleasing short story, in effect, set in mediaeval Japan. Far from obscure, it is entirely lucid and gentle. The poet tires of the way natural disaster destroys a succession of homes, until he finally retires to a tiny dwelling built with hinged walls, so that he can pick it up and transfer elsewhere should the need arise. That is what I think it says anyway but maybe not? "The Spoils" is a Sonata again, set in Persia where Bunting spent many years. Briggflatts, set in the North East of England, is apparently autobiographical. It is a pleasing flow of words and images and reflections and perhaps requires further reading to interpret them, or perhaps that would be ridiculous.
I have yet to tackle his books of "odes" and more besides is undiscovered country for now. But I am content knowing this sits on my poetry shelves and I can reach it down at a whim. This is a poet I can read for pleasure and not out of any delusion that I ought to or need to or should. Besides - I have always like the modernists, and that includes Bela Bartok.
From Villon:
......
Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.
Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
they are so rotten, old and thin,
or firm and soft and warm and full—
fellmonger Death gets every skin.
All that is piteous, all that’s fair,
all that is fat and scant of breath,
Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,
is Death’s collateral:
Three score and ten years after sight
of this pay me your pulse and breath
value received. And who dare cite,
as we forgive our debtors, Death?
Abelard and Eloise,
Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne,
Genée, Lopokova, all these
die, die in pain.
And General Grant and General Lee,
Patti and Florence Nightingale,
like Tyro and Antiope
drift among ghosts in Hell,
know nothing, are nothing, save a fume
driving across a mind
preoccupied with this: our doom
is, to be sifted by the wind,
heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands.
We are less permanent than thought.
......
What a pity that Bela Bartok
Cannot give his smug public a shock
By writing in parts
For the hiccups and farts
And conducting the piece with
He strongly advocated reading his poems aloud and Bloodaxe have released recordings of him reading work from this collection. I have not (yet) encountered them in this form but I suggest that a poet prepared to stand in front of an audience and read their own work is taking a great risk and must have some confidence that they will emerge with dignity. I recall that Bukowsky's idea of hell is to have to listen to other poets reading their work aloud. (Richmal Crompton's William would heartily agree but William would certainly be willing to have a go at reading his own work aloud, as he sometimes did to admiring little girls.) I would suggest that at least these poems differ from Bukowski's (and I fear William's) in being written from an adult rather than adolescent mind set. I do not think they suffer from comparison of style or technique with Bukowski (or William). I think the world Bunting occupies is a far more attractive, civilised, diverse and sane world than the downtown city life of a drunken American.
This volume is "complete" rather than selected, yet it is not unduly lengthy at 238 pages. It is certainly too dense to read through in one session, even spread over a few days, but not because it is a tough read. It is not that. But it is a pity to gallop through without pausing to savour the many pleasures and delights along the way.
The first poem,one of his "Sonatas" titled Villon (who was a French poet and vagabond, 1431 - 1463) amused me at once by selecting the following archaic expression:
"A blazing parchment, / Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold."
It helps to mention that Matthew Paris (1200 to 1259) produced illustrated manuscripts setting out the history of his times at St Albans in England. "Paris his kings" is so much more readable than the modern possessive, especially with the awkward "s" at the end of Paris. Do we write "Paris' Kings" which I think is correct, or "Paris's Kings" which I think is incorrect and disagreeable but somehow more intuitive, and in any case how do we pronounce it? I do not suggest the problem is terribly hard to solve for any reader - only that it exists and leads to a potential stumble while reading. The solution is to my mind perfectly correct and at the same time imaginative and very clever. That possessive apostrophe is not always as helpful as the earlier form and we should use that more.
And Bunting is very clever with language, as shown in his translations of poetry by Horace ...
....who'd risk being bored stiff every night
Lisening to father's sarcasms?...
(Horace)
and by others, such as this Persian poem which is a bit topical for me just now:
When the sword of sixty comes nigh his head
give a man no wine, for he is drunk with years.
Age claps a stick in my bridle-hand:
substance spent, health broken,
forgotten the skill to swerve aside from the joust
with the spearhead grazing my eyelashes.
The sentinel perched on the hill top
cannot see the countless army he used to see there:
the black summit's deep in snow
and its lord himself sinning against the army.
He was proud of his two swift couriers:
lo! sixty ruffians have put them in chains.
The singer is weary of his broken voice,
one drone for the bulbul alike and the lion's grousing.
Alas for flowery, musky sappy thirty
and the sharp Persian sword!
The pheasant strutting about the briar,
pomegranate-blossom and cypress sprig!
Since I raised my glass to fifty-eight
I have toasted only the bier and the burial-ground.
I ask the just Creator
so much refuge from Time
that a tale of mine may remain in the world
from this famous book of the ancients
and they who speak of such matters weighing their words
think of that only when they think of me.
Hakīm Abu'l-Qāsim Ferdowsī Tūsī Firdowsi
(Ferdosi)
But his own poems are no less inspired.
"The mason stirs.
Words!
Pens are too light.
Take a chisel to write."
(Bunting)
In "Chomei At Toyama" Bunting produces a very pleasing short story, in effect, set in mediaeval Japan. Far from obscure, it is entirely lucid and gentle. The poet tires of the way natural disaster destroys a succession of homes, until he finally retires to a tiny dwelling built with hinged walls, so that he can pick it up and transfer elsewhere should the need arise. That is what I think it says anyway but maybe not? "The Spoils" is a Sonata again, set in Persia where Bunting spent many years. Briggflatts, set in the North East of England, is apparently autobiographical. It is a pleasing flow of words and images and reflections and perhaps requires further reading to interpret them, or perhaps that would be ridiculous.
I have yet to tackle his books of "odes" and more besides is undiscovered country for now. But I am content knowing this sits on my poetry shelves and I can reach it down at a whim. This is a poet I can read for pleasure and not out of any delusion that I ought to or need to or should. Besides - I have always like the modernists, and that includes Bela Bartok.
From Villon:
......
Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.
Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
they are so rotten, old and thin,
or firm and soft and warm and full—
fellmonger Death gets every skin.
All that is piteous, all that’s fair,
all that is fat and scant of breath,
Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,
is Death’s collateral:
Three score and ten years after sight
of this pay me your pulse and breath
value received. And who dare cite,
as we forgive our debtors, Death?
Abelard and Eloise,
Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne,
Genée, Lopokova, all these
die, die in pain.
And General Grant and General Lee,
Patti and Florence Nightingale,
like Tyro and Antiope
drift among ghosts in Hell,
know nothing, are nothing, save a fume
driving across a mind
preoccupied with this: our doom
is, to be sifted by the wind,
heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands.
We are less permanent than thought.
......
August 1, 2017
This book is-- interesting-- he says, knowingly echoing the safe answer that the unsure student gives in class.
It is kind of cool to see a late blooming modernist doing his thing in defiance of what other people appear to care about. Yet there is very little to grab onto: he acknowledges the readers' claims less, perhaps, than anyone, which is one of the reasons he is more or less completely unknown. There are long passages of solid poetry that sounds good but doesn't do much else. Once in a while you'll hit a perfectly expressed line. If your experience is like mine, you simply won't remember much, I suppose.
The only poem I had come across of Buntings's before, and the only one which sticks with me after reading them all, is his "On a Fly Leaf of Pound's Cantos," which I recommend heartily.
If you're going to be a pendant to a major poet, this is a not ungracious way to go about it.
It is kind of cool to see a late blooming modernist doing his thing in defiance of what other people appear to care about. Yet there is very little to grab onto: he acknowledges the readers' claims less, perhaps, than anyone, which is one of the reasons he is more or less completely unknown. There are long passages of solid poetry that sounds good but doesn't do much else. Once in a while you'll hit a perfectly expressed line. If your experience is like mine, you simply won't remember much, I suppose.
The only poem I had come across of Buntings's before, and the only one which sticks with me after reading them all, is his "On a Fly Leaf of Pound's Cantos," which I recommend heartily.
If you're going to be a pendant to a major poet, this is a not ungracious way to go about it.
July 11, 2016
A few years before he died in 1985, Basil Bunting gave a reading of his works in Morden Tower, Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. I was pleased to be there. It remains in my mind as a good memory. Among other poets, I saw Ted Hughes and Stephen Spender recite their poetry in the late 1970's in the same place. I bought Complete Poems by Basil Bunting mostly because it contains his famous poem, Briggflatts. It was a pleasure to read, as it summoned memories of the moors and coast of Northumberland, and the reading of Anglo Saxon verse in modern English translation. The Spoils was another poem I enjoyed reading, and I liked some of the Odes and Overdrafts. Basil Bunting was a very English poet and his Complete Poems would be enjoyed by those who love fine English poetry.
April 7, 2010
The cult of Bunting has probably done him a disservice by focusing on his marginality, heroic crankiness, and stoic service to his allegedly wayward muse. The poems read better without all the baggage of hagiography.
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Returning to Bunting after a few years away, I'm sad to say the work isn't aging well. It's defining characteristic now seems to me -surprisingly, given Bunting's rep- a pronounced fussiness, an almost embarassing fetishizing of sound. And the occasional sentimentality jars, again because it's so out of keeping with the persona Bunting cultivated.
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Returning to Bunting after a few years away, I'm sad to say the work isn't aging well. It's defining characteristic now seems to me -surprisingly, given Bunting's rep- a pronounced fussiness, an almost embarassing fetishizing of sound. And the occasional sentimentality jars, again because it's so out of keeping with the persona Bunting cultivated.
October 2, 2019
He has a unique poetic voice, though I'm not entirely sold on him yet as a poet. I had bought this because I had read he was a significant though not as well known poet as perhaps T.S. Eliot (to me, that is), but I find it perhaps tougher to grab onto his work. "Briggflatts" was touted the most significant long poem in England since T.S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets' - though I don't find Bunting's voice to be as transcendent as Eliot's.
I will give him another try, and hopefully my opinion will differ.
I will give him another try, and hopefully my opinion will differ.
August 1, 2007
I have the Oxford edition of the Complete, but it is the same. One of the very best modernist poets of all time. The clarity, the use of consonants, the cadence, the subject matter, it's all there. Bunting wrote a fairly small body of work, but every poem is grade a OMG fabulous poem. The ghazals, Briggflats, all of it. Can't say enough about this poet. Bunting blows most of his peers out of the water. Just read Briggflatts aloud some time..you'll see what I mean.
April 3, 2024
I can't get into Bunting's original poems - i can't find a character in there and i don't find his ideas, words, contrasts, jokes, rhythms, etc interesting. Sometimes i find them irritating. I gather he was a friend and follower of Pound, but Pound is colourful.
Bunting's translations from Persian, though, are nice.
Aside from the poetry Bunting had an extraordinary life, and there are a couple of podcasts about him.
Bunting's translations from Persian, though, are nice.
Aside from the poetry Bunting had an extraordinary life, and there are a couple of podcasts about him.
January 13, 2015
Basil Bunting was a modernist poet, as well as a “poet’s poet.” He has been most appreciated by other great poets such as Ezra Pound, Alleng Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, Donald Davie, and others. He has been compared at times to Eliot. Only readers of poetry will not consider his name obscure.
This volume is interesting because it shows Bunting’s hunt for style throughout his long career. Without doubt, his greatest poem is the five-part autobiographical poem Briggflatts. The fifth is my favorite:
Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.
Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass,
yet in a sextant’s bubble present and firm
places a surveyor’s stone or steadies a tiller.
Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith
spun when the slowworm lay in her lap
fifty years ago.
My favorite of the volume is “A Song for Rustam.” I cannot say why specifically, but I find it profound and lyrical.
Tears are for what can be mended,
not for a voyage ended
the day the schooner put out.
Short fear and sudden quiet
too deep for a diving theif.
Tears are for easy grief.
My soil is shorn,
forests and corn.
Winter will bare the rock.
What has he left of pride
whose son is dead?
My soil has shaved its head.
The sky withers and stinks.
Star after star sinks
into the west, by you.
Whirling, spokes of the wheel
hoist up a faded day,
its sky wrinkled and grey.
Words slung to the gale
stammer and fail:
‘Unseen is not unknown,
unkisses is not unloved,
unheard is not unsung;’
Words late, lost, dumb.
Truth that shone is dim,
lies cripple every limb.
Where you were, you are not.
Silent, heavy air
stifles the heart’s leap.
Truth is asleep.
I struggle to adequately describe Bunting’s style. Modernist sounds like a meaningless copout. I will not really attempt it, other than to recommend that you read, and then re-read, this volume.
See my other reviews here!
This volume is interesting because it shows Bunting’s hunt for style throughout his long career. Without doubt, his greatest poem is the five-part autobiographical poem Briggflatts. The fifth is my favorite:
Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.
Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass,
yet in a sextant’s bubble present and firm
places a surveyor’s stone or steadies a tiller.
Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith
spun when the slowworm lay in her lap
fifty years ago.
My favorite of the volume is “A Song for Rustam.” I cannot say why specifically, but I find it profound and lyrical.
Tears are for what can be mended,
not for a voyage ended
the day the schooner put out.
Short fear and sudden quiet
too deep for a diving theif.
Tears are for easy grief.
My soil is shorn,
forests and corn.
Winter will bare the rock.
What has he left of pride
whose son is dead?
My soil has shaved its head.
The sky withers and stinks.
Star after star sinks
into the west, by you.
Whirling, spokes of the wheel
hoist up a faded day,
its sky wrinkled and grey.
Words slung to the gale
stammer and fail:
‘Unseen is not unknown,
unkisses is not unloved,
unheard is not unsung;’
Words late, lost, dumb.
Truth that shone is dim,
lies cripple every limb.
Where you were, you are not.
Silent, heavy air
stifles the heart’s leap.
Truth is asleep.
I struggle to adequately describe Bunting’s style. Modernist sounds like a meaningless copout. I will not really attempt it, other than to recommend that you read, and then re-read, this volume.
See my other reviews here!
March 30, 2008
Ok, my rating only applies to "Briggflatts"; I found an old copy at a library, but goodreads doesn't seem to have a separate entry for it. Anyway, this long poem is pretty amazing and it's one of the most musical pieces of writing I've ever read. The Northumbrian dialect was a bit difficult for me to read, but I learned some fun new words: "spuggies" are little sparrows, and "gentles" are maggots :)
Want to read
August 29, 2007another objectivist poet i'd like to read.
September 10, 2008
Holy shit!
November 6, 2011
Until Faber stop stuffing around and publish their proposed critical edition, this is the one poetry book from the twentieth century I wouldn't be without.
October 30, 2008
these are the alps
January 5, 2010
Re-reads: review to come
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