Features February 2017
A pattern of sound
On the life and poetry of Basil Bunting.
Richard Burton’s 2013 biography of Basil Bunting, A Strong Song Tows Us (reviewed in The New Criterion, April 2014), was a major event for admirers of this distinctive poet, and now Don Share—the editor of Poetry, to which Bunting frequently contributed—has given us the first authoritative edition of the poems, whose previous textual history was complicated by error and muddle as well as by the poet’s changes of mind in successive printings.1 Unfortunately—but unsurprisingly, given the scale of the project—there is a handful of misprints, the most eye-catching of which is the reading “Where are we” instead of “Where we...
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