Basil Bunting's Complete Poems--The Books of Odes

from The First Book of Odes

I am agog for foam. Tumultuous come

with teeming sweetness to the bitter shore

tidelong unrinsed and midday parched and numb

with expectation. If the bright sky bore

with endless utterance of a single blue

unphrased, its restless immobility

infects the soul, which must decline into

an anguished and exact sterility

and waste away: then how much more the sea

trembling with alteration must perfect

our loneliness by its hostility.

opening lines of 3

Those impatient thighs will be bruised soon enough.

Sniff the sweet narcotic distilled by coupled

skins.

9

He will shrink, his manhood leave him, slough selfaware

the last skin of the flayed: despair.

He will nurse his terror carefully, uncertain

even of death's solace

impotent to outpace

dispersion of the soul, disruption of the brain.

last lines of "10: Chorus of Furies"

Nothing

substance utters or time

stills and restrains

joins design and

supple measure deftly

as thought's intricate polyphonic

score dovetails with the tread

sensuous things

keep in our consciousness.

opening lines of 15

we have the sea to stare at,

its treason, capaciousness, tedium

last lines of 22

                  They say 'Adios!' shyly but look back

more than once, knowing our thoughts

                        and sharing our

                  desires and lack of faith in desire.

last lines of "30: The Orotava Road"

Days now

less bitter than

rind of wild gourd.

Cool breezes. Lips

moistened, there are words.

last lines of 33

from the Second Book of Odes

                                    Must [the girls]

also stop their ears to your tomcat

wailing, a promise your body cannot keep?

4

The breeze she wears

lifts and falls back.

. . .

giggles, ceramic

huddle of notes

10

Basil Bunting's Complete Poems is available from Amazon.co.uk.

Basil Bunting's Complete Poems--Briggflatts

from I

In such soft air

they trudge and sing,

laying the tune frankly on the air

from II

Crew grunt and gasp. Nothing he sees

they see, but hate and serve. Unscarred ocean,

day's swerve, swell's poise, pursuit,

he blends, balances, drawing leagues under the keel

to raise cold cliffs where tides

knot fringes of weed.

from III

Heart slow, nerves numb and memory, he lay

on glistening moss by a spring;

as a woodman dazed by an adder's sting

barely within recall

tests the rebate tossed to him, so he

ascertained moss and bracken,

a cold squirm snaking his flank

and breath leaked to his ear:

I am neither snake nor lizard,

I am the slowworm.

Ripe wheat is my lodging. I polish

my side on pillars of its transept,

gleam in its occasional light.

Its swaying

copies my gait.

...

Sycamore seed twirling,

O, writhe to its measure!

Dust swirling trims pleasure.

Thorns prance in a gale.

In air snow flickers,

twigs tap,

elms drip.

Swaggering, shimmering fall,

drench and towel us all!

So he rose and led home silently through clean woodland

where every bough repeated the slowworm's song.

from IV

I hear Aneurin number the dead and rejoice,

being adult male of a merciless species.

Today's posts are piles to drive into the quaggy past

on which impermanent palaces balance.

...

Clear Cymric voices carry well this autumn night,

Aneurin and Taliesin, cruel owls

for whom it is never altogether dark, crying

before the rules made poetry a pedant's game. 

...

Applewood, hard to rive,

its knots smoulder all day.

from V

Drip--icicle's gone.

Slur, ratio, tone,

chime dilute what's done

as a flute clarifies song,

trembling phrase facing to pause

then glow. Solstice past,

years end crescendo.

...

Mist sets lace of frost

on rock for the tide to mangle.

Day is wreathed in what summer lost.

...

silence by silence sits,

and Then is diffused in Now.

...

Starlight is almost flesh.

...

Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,

each his own, the longer known the more alone,

wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.

Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass,

yet in a sextant's bubble present and firm

places a surveyor's stone or steadies a tiller.

Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,

its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane

spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith

spun when the slowworm lay in her lap

fifty years ago.

...

Starlight quivers. I had day enough.

For love uninterrupted night.

Bloodaxe's new edition of Briggflatts, including a CD of Bunting's reading of the poem and a DVD film of Bunting, can be purchased from Amazon.co.uk.

Basil Bunting's Complete Poems--Sonatas

Briggflatts is part of the Sonatas but will have its own post.

My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies.

*

                                    our doom

is, to be sifted by the wind,

heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands.

We are less permanent than thought.

*

precision clarifying vagueness;

boundary to a wilderness

of detail; chisel voice

smoothing the flanks of noise;

catalytic making whisper and whisper

run together like two drops of quicksilver

"Villon"

Out of puff

noonhot in tweeds and gray felt,

tired of appearance and

disappearance;

warm obese frame limp with satiety;

slavishly circumspect at sixty;

he spreads over the ottoman

scanning the pictures and and table trinkets.

(That hand's dismissed shadow

moves through fastidiously selective consciousness,

rearranges pain.)

*

                        In the morning

clean streets welcomed light's renewal,

patient, passive to the weight of buses

thundering like cabinet ministers

over a lethargic populace.

"Attis: Or, Something Missing"

(the first passage is the opening of the poem)

But their determination to banish fools foundered

ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Fear of being imputed

naive impeded thought.

*

Have you seen a falcon stoop

accurate, unforseen

and absolute, between

wind-ripples over harvest? Dread

of what's to be, is and has been--

were we not better dead?

His wings churn air

to flight.

Feathers alight

with sun, he rises where

dazzle rebuts our stare,

wonder our fright.

"The Spoils"

Basil Bunting's Complete Poems (Bloodaxe, 2000) is available at The Book Depository.