Basil Bunting by Julian Stanard.

In which yet another promised book about Bunting goes missing.

The publication date passes, and the book seller refunds my pre order because they can't tell me when the thing might actually come into existence. Might be next week, might be next year...bit like the promised Faber Collected.

What is it with these people? I can buy Ted Hughes' pointless "criticism", and not only his thick volume of letters and his door step collected, but even his correspondence with Keith Sagar.  There's a publishing industry surrounding the man: he hasn't been dead that long and a search on 'Ted hughes biography' on Amazon throws up 54 results.  54! 


I want to know what Peter Makin left out of the Bunting Pound correspondence which he quotes and which I've been using,  and the only way I can do that is to go to America and shift through various collections in various libraries.

Come to think of it, this is not a bad idea if anyone wants to fund it.  I'm a medievalist by training, we are good at sifting in libraries. I volunteer to go to the USA,  search through collections, scan them all and upload them electronically as pdfs and to hell with the publishing industry. (With apologies to Bunting's insistence his letters should be burnt.) 

On a less grumbling note what does it say about the reality of the poetry world if blurbs keep saying "generally regarded as one of the great British poets of the 20th century" and no publisher is willing to publish anything about him?