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Basil Bunting, Collected Poems, ed. Richard Caddel. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, £9.95.

Basil Bunting reads ‘Briggflatts’ and Other Poems. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, £9.95.

     The introduction of direct trains dates the story a little, but in his early days in Hull Larkin joked about the Jake Balokowskys of this world travelling up from London to bother him, then looking at the connections and deciding “to go to Newcastle and bother Basil Bunting instead”. Before his return to England in 1957, knowing where to find the Northumbrian poet at all was a tricky business, as readers may remember from Keith Aldritt’s swashbuckling biography The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting. Pinning down Bunting’s early style too was tricky. Briggflatts was published by Fulcrum Press in 1966, and ever since has occupied the still, central point of Bunting’s oeuvre, but before that he had seemed a writer happy to freewheel in different directions, sometimes several at once. The reason for this was not just the aping of early influences, such as we find in Larkin too, but Bunting’s belief from the outset in world poetry, and disdain for an art confined to a single national tradition – such as we do not find in Larkin. Ribbing a more stay-at-home contemporary in ‘Reading X’s Collected Works’, Bunting the copious translator declared his contentment to be a “cemetery of other men’s bastards” rather than raise a “sufficient family of versicles;/ like you in the main”. A cemetery rather than a maternity hospital: Bunting wasn’t always sure that English could take the strain of Rudaki, Hafiz, Firdosi and the rest, and called his versions ‘overdrafts’ rather than translations, as though impoverished Anglo-American could accommodate these alien modes only by going into the linguistic red.

     The pairing or playing off of Bunting against Larkin is something Thom Gunn likes doing in interview, reminding us that it is from the first rather than the second that British poets should be learning; perhaps this is just the latest form of Bunting’s tendency to move in other writers’ shadows. With Zukofsky, he was one of the dedicatees of Pound’s Active Anthology (“two strugglers in the desert”), and his ode on the Cantos is one of the best-known of his short poems, still brandished at those who can’t see the point of Ezra’s madcap epic (“These are the Alps,/ fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble”). Yet it was Eliot, the Eliot who declined to publish him, who was for long the more dominant influence. The best of his early poems, ‘Chomei at Toyama’ (1932), is ‘Gerontion’ with a cackle rather than a cough, its old man full of sparky stamina rather than dry thoughts of Dutch estaminets:

Swirl sleeping in the waterfall!
On motionless pools scum appearing
                           disappearing!

Eaves formal on the zenith,
lofty city Kyoto,
wealthy, without antiquities!

Housebreakers clamber about,
builders raising floor upon floor
at the corner sites, replacing
gardens by bungalows.

In the town where I was known
the young men stare at me.
A few faces I know remain.

     It’s not just Eliot that Bunting echoes (his sounding like other people was precisely what Eliot, in tu quoque mood, held against him). There’s a Hopkinsesque exuberance about that “appearing/ disappearing”, since disappearing is what the waterfall appears to do, rather than the two actions simply following one after the other. The characteristic elisions too contribute to the sense of immediacy. Like Pound’s ‘Cathay’, this is poetry that enjoys the long view, with its chronicle-like insouciance at the spectacle of natural catastrophe and epic human misfortune, even if the spirit of the monologue is closer to ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, long a favourite of Bunting’s. But going the long way round through the classics can also be a good way of writing about the present, as Pound shows in ‘Propertius’ and Bunting in the anti-war satire of ‘The Well of Lycopolis’ (1935).

     Mention of Hopkins brings up the musical theme, another side of Bunting that ranges him against Movement values. Consider Kingsley Amis’s 1950 letter to Larkin, diagnosing what’s wrong with Gerard Manley Hopkins. His poetry is “going after the wrong thing, trying to treat words as if they were music. They aren’t, are they?” And if this sort of poetry can’t be read without us making allowances for its musical wrong-headedness, “so much the worse for it”. Finding a pentametric key signature in Briggflatts may be as difficult as picking out the major triads in Pierrot Lunaire, but so much the worse for the reader who approaches Bunting with an Amis-like understanding of how English verse music works. For the truth of Bunting’s metrics is that, indebted though they are to the foreign models of Chomei at Toyama, ‘Attis’ and ‘Villon’, they come to fruition in Briggflatts only when its author comes to see himself as an “unconvinced deserter” from something essential and native in his make-up – a chthonic call marking yet another difference from the author of ‘I Remember, I Remember’. What Bunting gained by answering this call can be seen as early as the poem’s warmly Northumbrian epigraph: “The spuggies are fledged”. But this is a return of the native with a difference: as often as not, hearing Bunting’s lines means learning to hear past the pentametric fly-swat the English, “with their natural propensity for fluff”,  have somehow convinced themselves is the natural rhythm of verse. (For more on Bunting and metrics, cf. Peter Makin (ed.) Basil Bunting on Poetry from which I take this quotation.) For Bunting, modern English prosody properly begins with Wyatt rather than Chaucer.

     A notable feature of the readings on the Bloodaxe double-cassette accompanying Collected Poems is a fondness for the lovingly paused-over monosyllable. Of the 62 words in the poem’s coda, only six make it to a second syllable. It is also exploited in the rhyming couplets that close each of the twelve thirteen-line stanzas in the poem’s first section. With its constant talk of engraving, concision is all: “The solemn mallet says:/ In the grave’s slot/ he lies. We rot”. Or: “Words!/ Pens are too light./ Take a chisel to write.” Or again: “Name and date/ split in soft slate/ a few months obliterate.” The melopoeia (in Pound’s word) is exquisite, but beneath all the structural comparisons with Scarlatti and Bunting’s rummaging in the myth-kitty, what is Briggflatts actually about? In vulgar narrative terms, the answer is straightforward enough. The childhood love idyll of the opening section is traded for decades of quixotic wanderings, mirrored by those of Alexander the Great, and is tragically commemorated a half-century later in the closing lines. Putting it as baldly as this is a bit like saying that Moby Dick has something to do with a whale. But what Bunting represents in contemporary verse is every bit as elusive as a white whale: poetry irreducible to prose paraphrase, and achieving a condition of almost pure musicality. Bunting as his best, that is, which cannot be said to include the more throat-clearing Odes, the Pound pastiche (however good it may be as pastiche), a good deal of chatty inconsequentiality in the ‘overdrafts’. The Bunting, in other words, of Briggflatts; which is more than enough. Like the adolescent love affair that inspired it, it inhabits a place dove sta memoria, to use another Poundian tag, where memory endures:

The sheets are gathered and bound,
the volume indexed and shelved,
dust on its marbled leaves.
Lofty, an empty combe,
silent but for bees.
Finger tips touched and were still
fifty years ago.
Sirius is too young to remember.

Sirius glows in the wind. Sparks on ripples
mark his line, lures for spent fish.

Fifty years a letter unanswered;
a visit postponed for fifty years.

She has been with me fifty years.

Starlight quivers. I had day enough.
For love uninterrupted night.