The Ecliptic

Poetry. Edited by Richard Owens. First published by Faber & Faber in 1930, THE ECLIPTIC is a lost modernist classic. Complex in structure, rich in music, it was hailed by Morton Dauwen Zabel in Poetry as a new "Dawn in Britain." Basil Bunting declared, "The Ecliptic interested me more than any new thing since The Waste Land..." Richard Owens explains in his afterword to this edition: "The poem offers the narrative of a single consciousness in twelve parts, each of which corresponds to one of twelve constellations in the Western zodiac. It begins with Aries and closes with Pisces, moving from birth to death, with each section conveying a mood or quality specific to its phase of life and corresponding astrological sign."