BUNTING, Basil; Don SHARE (editor). The Poems of Basil Bunting. London: Faber and Faber. 2016.
8vo. Original black paper-covered boards lettered in silver to the spine, in the dustwrapper showing a photograph of the author by Jonathan Williams; pp. xl, 571, [13]; minor pushing to spine tips, small bump to upper outer corner of front panel, a little creasing to wrapper tips and corners; a crisp near fine copy in like wrapper.
First edition of this first critical edition of the great Northumbrian poet, meticulously edited by Don Share.
With this magisterial volume, editor Don Share and Faber and Faber posthumously provide Bunting with the volume his work warrants and readers have waited for. Published variously by a number of small presses, with larger collections issued by Fulcrum Press, Oxford University Press, Bloodaxe, New Directions along the way, this is the first critical edition of the complete poems, offering an accurate text together with variants from all printed sources. Share’s exhaustive notes illuminate these difficult, complex and allusive poems, drawing upon the poet’s prose writings, interviews and correspondence, uncovering the poet’s sources, including Persian literature, classical mythology, and notably his Northumbrian roots, vocabulary and dialect.
Best known for Briggflatts, the extended autobiographical poem which, in scope and ambition, can be compared with Pound’s Cantos, or Olson’s Maximus Poems, this volume allows readers to explore the full range of the work for the first time.
SKU: 2124040