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One of Scotland's greatest twentieth-century lyric poets portrays the character and beauty of his native Orkney Islands. -- Back cover.
In this new Selected Poems, Kathleen Jamie explores the multi-faceted world of George Mackay Brown's Orkney, the poet's lifelong home and inspiration. George Mackay Brown's concerns were the ancestral world, the communalities of work, the fables and religious stories which he saw as underpinning mortal lives. Brown believed from the outset that poets had a social role and his true task was to fulfil that role. This is not the attitude of a shrinking violet, tentatively exploring his 'voice'. Art was sprung from the community, and his role as poet to know that community, to sing its stories. But there was also room for introspection; the poet's task was simultaneously to 'interrogate silence'.
George Mackay Brown's first book of poems, reprinted with illustrations from Orkney.
In this novel set on the fictitious island of Norday in the Orkneys, George Mackay Brown beckons us into the imaginary world of the young Thorfinn Ragnarson, the son of a crofter. In his day-dreams he relives the history of this island people, travelling back in time to join Viking adventurers at the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople, then accompanying a Falstaffian knight to the battle of Bannockburn. Thorfinn wakes to the twentieth century and a community whose way of life, steeped in legend and tradition, has remained unchanged for centuries. But as the boy grows up - and falls in love with a vivacious and mysterious stranger - the transforming effect of modern civilization...
'Vinland' follows the turbulent life of Ranald Sigmunson, a young boy born into the Dark Ages, when Orkney was torn between its Viking past and its Christian future.
George Mackay Brown wrote this memoir in the years before his death in 1996, but he did not want it published while he lived. Here we see the author's simple, bardic honesty turned on himself. In particular, he looks at Orkney, where he was born the youngest child in a poor family, and which he rarely left.
First published in 1969, An Orkney Tapestry, George Mackay Brown's seminal work, is a unique look at Orkney through the eye of a poet. Originally commissioned by his publisher as an introduction to the Orkney Islands, Brown approached the writing from a unique perspective and went on to produce a rich fusion of ballad, folk tale, short story, drama and environmental writing. The book, written at an early stage in the author's career, explores themes that appear in his later work and was a landmark in Brown's development as a writer. Above all, it is a celebration of Orkney's people, language and history. This edition reproduces Sylvia Wishart's beautiful illustrations, commissioned for the original hardback.Made available again for the first time in over 40 years, this new edition sits alongside Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain as an important precursor of environmental writing by the likes of Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Malachy Tallack and, most recently, Amy Liptrot.
Greenvoe, the community on the Orkney Island of Hellya, has existed unchanged for generations. George Mackay Brown has recreated a week in its life, mixing history with personality in a sparkling mixture of prose and poetry.