Part of our excitement every day at Tavern Books has to do with the work of bringing
out-of-print books back into a living catalog. Publishers have the
great responsibility—and the great luck—to serve as advocates for
writers, and in our case that means attempting to reintroduce
important, loved poets who have gone under-represented. This week, I've been
listening to an LP of Basil Bunting reading his long poem
“Briggflatts” and thinking about the history of a tremendous poet
who was little known for the majority of his life. As the story goes,
what slight recognition Bunting garnered as a young poet (including the
admiration and very public support of Ezra Pound) couldn't withstand
his long service to the British Military during and following World
War II; when he returned to his native Newcastle in his
fifties, he suffered a long period of painful poverty and obscurity.
But helped by the fierce advocacy of a group of young writers who
were in awe of his poetry, he was able to gain a public presence very
late in life. At the helm of this group was the rogue adolescent poet
Tom Pickard, who organized readings for Bunting in Newcastle and
promoted his work to publishers like Fulcrum Press. It was during
this second wind, at the age of sixty-four, that Bunting began his masterpiece
“Briggflatts”—an intensely musical and guttural
autobiographical poem about a lost love from his youth. To think: one of the first things he did after being rediscovered was to recover for the world something else that had been lost! What strikes
me most when reading it, and especially when hearing Bunting read it
on the recording, is that the very precise and real object of love at
the center of the poem seems almost equally weighted with the
beautiful, boggy layers of personal, local, and national history;
regional mythology; and literary tradition that unfold around her. It's
as if when Bunting resurrected his lost love, he couldn't help but
dredge up all kinds of cultural debris with her. With any hope,
that's the kind of dredging-up that we—the reading public, writers,
literary advocates, and publishers—can accomplish when we help
usher a forgotten but loved poet back into a catalog.
--Natalie Garyet
