George Mackay Brown

Product Information

We are excited to be presenting a new publication of poetry and prose from Orkney writers this year. Edited by writer Alison Miller, it is called Gousters, Glims and Veerie-orums, and includes a broad variety of writing in Orcadian from the Orkney Voices Writing Group: Vera Butler, Lorraine Bruce, Sheila Garson, Ingrid Grieve, Issy Grieve, Barbara Johnston, Greer Norquoy – as well as previous members, Moyra Brown, Caroline Hume and Barbara West.

A Celebration for Magnus (son et Lumiere text by Brown, music by Davies; produced in Kirkwall, Orkney, 1988), Nairn, Balnain, 1987.Perse, Saint-John (1930), Anabasis. A poem by St.-J. Perse, with a translation into English by T. S. Eliot.

Brown was a poet who looked across modern Orkney with a sense of history, a preference for the past, and the persuasive idea that time will tell. How much of Brown's life was a place of suffering and decision, as well as quiet and monotony, is revealed in Maggie Fergusson's excellent and surprising biography. Also revealed are details of his affairs with women, few admittedly, but genuine, and the extent of his travels, also few. For about six months, she lent Brown prints of the photographs she had chosen for the book, which was to be published at the opening of a first retrospective of her work…. The images were propped on an easel, several at a time, in Brown's sitting room. Moberg had asked him just for short captions. But secretly—until the final drafts—he wrote full-fledged poems, 48 in all. The museum stands on its own pier within spitting distance of the small ex-council flat where Brown spent the latter half of his life. By the 1990s he was obliged to pin notices on his front door. "No callers before 2pm", or "WORKING ALL DAY", but still people came. In one letter Brown, ever a seeker after solitude and silence, notes wearily that "200 people have called this summer". Some came clutching copies of Greenvoe or An Orkney Tapestry to be signed, others merely to clap eyes on this near-mythic island bard. Today, a decade after his death, he is being further woven into the Orkney tourist experience - landscape photographs with lines from his poetry decorate the ferry which serves the islands.

Beginnings

Brown's poetry and prose have been seen as characterised by "the absence of frills and decoration; the lean simplicity of description, colour, shape and action reduced to essentials, which heightens the reality of the thing observed," [90] while "his poems became informed by a unique voice that was his alone, controlled and dispassionate, which allowed every word to play its part in the narrative scheme of the unfolding poem." [91] A guidebook today comments that the barriers have "probably saved these isles from postwar depopulation."

Orkney, at the northeastern tip of mainland Scotland, across the Pentland Firth, is not, strictly speaking, "an" island. It is 67 islands. Sixteen of them are inhabited by people and cows; many more by birds. Even a hasty visitor (the only kind of visitor I have so far been) to this remote outpost of Britain immediately senses that to Orcadians, the archipelago is unquestionably the center of the known universe. It makes all those other places elsewhere seem peripheral and distant. This theme of time—"the ocean of time"—in a way defines him. "Haunted by time," Brown delved into Orkney's various pasts, while distrusting the modern technologies of North Sea oil drilling and uranium mining. Rigs and mines marred Orkney's sea and land, he felt, just as television corrupted storytelling, telephones distracted thought, and modern conveniences masked the rhythms of nature and life and language. The poet, who was famously reclusive and disinclined to leave his beloved Orkney, was nonetheless kind in offering his condolences and began chatting about my dad’s brother, Bill, in terms which came as close to excitement as he could muster. By early 1977, he was entering a period of depression which lasted intermittently for almost a decade, but maintained his working routine throughout. [57] He also had severe bronchial problems, his condition becoming so serious that in early 1981 he was given the Last Sacraments. [58]With Peter Maxwell Davies) Apple-Basket, Apple-Blossom: For Unaccompanied Choir SATB (musical score), Chester Music (London), 1992. There were no frills, but a lilting hint of the otherworldly qualities of a man who had faced many privations in his life, including tuberculosis, cancer and a variety of bronchial conditions, and wasn’t about to start complaining now he was in his 70s.