All through my twenties I read Basil Bunting with a kind of avid awe. The sounds and forms of his poems seemed to me at once remote and exemplary, too singular to learn from in any direct way, perhaps, and yet guiding examples nonetheless. I loved the aural imperative of the verse, which you hear before you understand, or which, in a sense, to hear is to understand. I loved the dense textures, the sculpted syllables, the way the lines seem almost to bristle with contempt for anything extraneous or merely ornamental. Most of all, I loved the way you can feel the form of this poetry over large stretches of verse, the way it accretes without losing precision, is in some major way as abstract as music yet never loses specificity. You cannot exhaust a poetry like this:

A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letter’s edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.
Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot.

What I’m wondering, then, is why, at the age of thirty-seven, and not having read Bunting carefully for some years, should I have found making my way through his Collected Poems in the past few weeks so damned hard?

Bunting was born in Northumbria—Wordsworth country—but it took a long time for his life