Basil Bunting: The First Book of Odes

The first publication of the Fulcrum Press, which was to make an important contribution to poetry publishing in Britain, Bunting's First Book of Odes, was published in a limited edition of less than two hundred copies. It reprints the 34 poems designated “Odes” in Poems: 1950, adding to them “The Orotova Road”, which was included in Poems: 1950 but not then included in the “Odes”, and two further poems “On highest summit dawn comes soonest” and “On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos”. “My odes are called odes”, Bunting declared in one interview, “because Horace called his odes. An ode is essentially a sonnet to be sung, not all of mine are meant to be sung;