August Kleinzahler

The attack jets comes in low over the ocean past the tennis courts and the Duchess’s cottage, in tandem low over the Navy golf-course headed for the North Island airstrip then wheel to the left out over the water again, the afternoon’s last light making a movie set of the offshore islands around and back once more past the grand old wooden hotel and its...

In 1964 Basil Bunting began writing his long poem Briggflatts on the train from Wylam to Newcastle, where he was in charge of the financial page of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. In June that year Bunting had written to a friend: ‘Nothing about myself. I feel I have been dead for ten years now, and my ghost doesn’t walk. Dante has nothing to tell me about Hell that I don’t know for myself.’ Bunting’s poem was completed in a year. At least a couple of reliable commentators think the original version of the poem ran to 20,000 lines. In its final form it is about 700. Although he’d published nothing in 13 years and written no new poems as such, Bunting had been filling notebooks. Wretched as he was at his job, and struggling at the age of 64 to support two children and the wife he had brought back with him from Persia as a teenage bride, he’d had a transforming experience. A local 18-year-old had phoned Bunting out of the blue and asked him if it would be all right if he showed the older man some of his poems. Bunting told him to come round and the boy showed up an hour later, ‘longhaired and fairly ragged, with a fist full of manuscript. He said: “I heard you were the greatest living poet.” ’ Bunting got a kick out of the young man, Tom Pickard, and found much in the poetry that excited him. He wrote to Dorothy Pound in June 1965: ‘Well, I thought, if poetry really has the power to renew itself, I’d better write something for these younger chaps to read … I planned a longish poem, about 750 lines, which I finished about a month ago and have just revised and sent off to Poetry Chicago today. I believe it is the best thing I’ve done.’ As we close in on the centenary of Basil Bunting’s birth at Scotswood-on-Tyne in 1900 it looks more and more as if this long poem written late in his life is not simply the best thing that Bunting had done but among the very best poems anyone has done this century.‘

Coolness at evening, a delicate astringent

It seems only last week those sunsets, like gardens of sky in all their extravagance, kept on without end,

the lightest of breezes, trembling sage.

Now, the curtains drawn earlier each evening, the dinner wine left half-finished.

One guest after another passing through. A few quiet hours here, a long, difficult journey from town, before heading on.

...

The janitor washing the blackboard in Mrs Turnaud’s class

February night not too far from the border with Vermont

snowless, and still a little stoned

thinks he caught a patch of aurora borealis out the window

or maybe just a headlight off a cloud

     *

Thank you for kissing me just then It was getting to be rather a swarm in there with the tendrils,...