Basil Bunting: The Complete Poems
Basil Bunting: The Complete Poems, Oxford and New York: 1994. £10.99.
“It looks well on the page, but never/ well enough” is a line from Basil Bunting’s most successful and longest poem Briggflatts and one that would serve as the rudimentary principle of his art. A self-avowed disciple of Pound and Zukofsky, Bunting believes that poetry can only be fully realised when it is read aloud, can only reach its maximum effect and meaning when the full subtleties of the phonetics and rhythms of language are revealed. The sounds that the words make are not meant to be some happy by-product of their literal meaning, they are themselves an important constituent of that meaning; they are the musical qualities of language which approximate a more intuitive and essential expression.
It is not surprising that Bunting mostly writes in free verse and relies on rhythmical counterpoint to form his metrical patterns. Which is not to say that the poetry wallows in a mass of undisciplined sets of stressed and unstressed syllables; conventional rhythmical patterns are discernible but they are sophisticated by intrusive variations which emphasise certain words within the line just as a mild rubato might sophisticate the rhythm of music. So what we get are falling and rising rhythms interlaced accordingly with spondees and pyrrhics to alter the pace. Rhymes are subjected to counterpointed rhythm in such a way that monosyllabic words are rhymed with disyllabic ones, with the rhyming syllable stressed irregularly, rather like musical syncopation: me/ body, fill/ weevil, mad/ ballad. Rhyme counterpoint is also used; varying the length of the line whilst maintaining the rhyme not only acts as a pausing mechanism but creates the effect common in symphonic music of lingering on an established theme before launching into another. Nor are the musical qualities restricted to meter; patterns of rising and falling are achieved through manipulation of high and low vowel sounds, thus conveying impressions of musical pitch.
This isn’t going to be enough for most readers of poetry. But for Bunting form and content are inseparable. His musical poetry is about the musically poetic structure of the world at large. Frequently we find the landscape itself composing art, whether it be “syllables flicker[ing] out of grass”, the wind writing “in foam on the sea”, or a tortoise “punctuating the text”. A recurrent line in Briggflatts is “laying the tune on the air” and this harmonic integration between landscape and human art is articulated by the way poetry emerges as an organic process, frequently equated with the act of conceiving; at one point in Briggflatts there is an authoritative juxtaposition between “sentence” and “life”.
Bunting teeters on the boundaries of the Modernist tradition in other ways; the long poems follow a fluid, sequential structure which resists a clear unitary meaning, but does not repel it in such a way as the great Modernist texts might be claimed to do. One feels reasonably compelled to try to seek out the meaning of a Bunting poem, and what strikes most is the way poetry emerges as something more substantial than bodily life itself. The poems are full of images of decay, flaying skin and bodily dispersion; a fear that the mortal self might be all too insubstantial. The bulk of Bunting’s translations (called ‘Overdrafts’) of Latin and Persian texts is concerned with ageing and abounds with recollective old poets, mourning the loss of their youth and vigour, stick in hand, begging in places where they were once famous but are no longer recognised. Bunting fits easily within that long legacy of poets who present the work of art as a more resilient and permanent aspect of identity, something that will outlast bodily death.
Death, not surprisingly, crops up regularly, but there is a curious tension in Bunting’s work between a distaste for the ageing process and a desire for change and development. Permanence is saddled not only with endless happiness but with paralysis and sterility. Cyclical movements - seasons, tides, moons, night and day - are more positively treated and associated with fertility, yet overseeing all is an acute awareness of the linearity of human existence. Amidst the cycles of the world at large, which “is always like a round rolling eye”, man is on an impregnable course towards “Death, the kind unmaker/ In whom no man has faith”.
Perhaps Bunting is at his best when most abstract. Although it is possible to chart the poems chronologically and feel the impact of the 1930s depression, the war years and the consciousness of declining Northumbrian rural traditions, the impression remains of a poet more concerned with the rhythms and perplexities of time than with social issues.
This new edition brings together those poems canonized by Bunting himself and, in a separate section, extra poems that were collected and published after his death. With one or two exceptions there is little to suggest that the uncollected works are fragments, and the themes and style are broadly comparable with the collected poems. Probably only the serious enthusiast will find it fascinating to compare them fully. Also included are two ordinary and forgettable pieces of juvenilia.
Page(s) 68-71
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The