Richard Burton’s 2013 biography of Basil Bunting, A Strong Song Tows Us (reviewed in The New Criterion, April 2014), was a major event for admirers of this distinctive poet, and now Don Share—the editor of Poetry, to which Bunting frequently contributed—has given us the first authoritative edition of the poems, whose previous textual history was complicated by error and muddle as well as by the poet’s changes of mind in successive printings.1 Unfortunately—but unsurprisingly, given the scale of the project—there is a handful of misprints, the most eye-catching of which is the reading “Where are we” instead of “Where we are” in line 12 of the Coda to Briggflatts. In addition, the first line of the translation from the Emperor Hadrian is given as “Poor soul! Softly, whisperer” instead of “Poor soul! Softy, whisperer.” (I am grateful to Mr. Share for correspondence about these points.) Share’s notes give copious details of publication, glosses, and explanations of allusions. He directs us to unsuspected byways of Bunting’s reading as well as to obvious sources; thorough acquaintance with the classical epics, Lucretius, and Dante is expected, but also a knowledge of the architecture of mosques, the narrative of Eric Bloodaxe in Icelandic saga, and the history, geography, and dialect of Northumbria, among other matters. (“Perhaps it is superfluous,” Bunting himself notes of one poem, “to mention Darwin’s Formation of Vegetable Mould.” Well, quite.) A major bonus is the extensive quotations, helpfully printed in bold type, from