Briggflatts: AND Other Poems

Publisher and industry reviews

UK Kirkus review

For lovers of poetry these readings by Basil Bunting of his own poetry are a treat. As the poet said himself, 'Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another... Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry.' So it is appropriate that these recordings were published in the year 2000 to celebrate the Northumbrian poet's centenary. Most of the first tape is taking up by a 1960s studio recording of Bunting reading his best known work, Briggflatts. His accent and voice give an added dimension to this modernistic celebration of the poet's northern roots, which has been compared by critics to the longer poems of T S Eliot. In addition to Briggflatts, on the first tape there are further studio recordings of Bunting reading selected Odes which are here made publicly available for the first time. The second tape contains live recordings of readings by the poet, one from 1977 and the other from 1979. They include the longer poems Villion and The Spoils, plus selected Odes and Overdrafts, as Bunting termed them. His approach to poetry brings together the modernism he shared with friends and contemporaries, Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, and the oral traditions he grew up with. This mixture makes his poetry as strange and wonderful as the life he led. Bunting's vigorous readings are a treasure to be visited again and again. (Kirkus UK)

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