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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...more
Paperback, 239 pages
Published
November 19th 2003
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
(first published 1994)
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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/issueConte...
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 le...more
Associate Editor: Richard Caddel
New Directions Press
239 pp. $ 16.95 paper
Reviewed by Jamey Hecht for American Book Review
http://americanbookreview.org/issueConte...
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 le...more
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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 ...more
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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 ...more
Re-reads: review to come
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.
I assume Joyce for one whose language could take shape and color in sound and syntax, but it belongs to Basil Bunting, too. Thickly wrought, Bunting's language exists in a fresh physical space among his modernist contemporaries and today's contemporaries, still. Experience finds form beautifully, interpretively: "Gentle generous voices weave / over bare night / words to confirm and delight / till bird dawn."
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 :)
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.
not enough people read bunting..beast or, as he might have had it, bull..always have with you
cristiana
marked it as to-read
another objectivist poet i'd like to read.
these are the alps
Brad Craft
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Born into a Quaker family in Scotswood-on-Tyne, Northumberland (now part of Newcastle upon Tyne), 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.[2]. His Quaker education strongly influenced his pacifist opposition to World War I, and ...more
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