Photo credit: Jon Craig
Thursday, 25 September; 3pm; Great Hall, Hexham Abbey
In this Festival highlight, poet Sean O’Brien performs the evocative and rarely heard 20th century poetry masterpiece, Briggflatts by Basil Bunting. The poems are interspersed with music by Domenico Scarlatti played on the harpsichord by John Green, a former Director of Music at the Abbey.
Sean O’Brien is an award-winning poet, critic and playwright. He currently lives in Newcastle Upon Tyne where he is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
£15 / £5 children & students / all unreserved
Sponsored by: Rotary Club of Hexham
Basil Bunting at Brigflatts meeting house; photo credit: Derek Smith and Bloodaxe Books
Basil Bunting (1900-85) was one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain – in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called ‘the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’.
Bunting called Briggflatts his ‘autobiography’. It is a complex work, drawing on many elements of his life, experience and knowledge, and features the saint Cuthbert and the warrior king Eric Bloodaxe as two opposing aspects of the Northumbrian – and his – character. Its structural models include the sonata form (and Scarlatti’s music in particular) and the latticework of the Lindisfarne Gospels, while thematically it recalls Wordsworth’s Prelude.
Bunting wrote that ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard.’ His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. The Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of Briggflatts in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film portrait of Bunting. As well as his own notes to the poem (and a posthumously published additional Note), the new edition includes his seminal essay on sound and meaning in poetry, ‘The Poet’s Point of View’ (1966), and other background material. All his poetry is available in Complete Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2000).
‘Briggflatts is one of the few great poems of this century. It seems to me greater each time I read it’ – Thom Gunn.
‘His poems are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’ – Hugh MacDiarmid.
Bunting spent his later life in poverty and died in 1985 in Hexham General Hospital, near his last home in Whitley Chapel, Northumberland.