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Carve the Runes: Selected Poems
In this, the first new selection of George Mackay Brown’s poetry for over 25 years, Kathleen Jamie explores the multi-faceted world of the poet’s Orkney, his 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. Art was sprung from the community, and his role as poet to know that community, to sing its stories.
224 pages, Paperback
Published June 3, 2021
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About the author
George Mackay Brown
183 books101 followersGeorge Mackay Brown, the poet, novelist and dramatist, spent his life living in and documenting the Orkney Isles.
A bout of severe measles at the age of 12 became the basis for recurring health problems throughout his life. Uncertain as to his future, he remained in education until 1940, a year which brought with it a growing reality of the war, and the unexpected death of his father. The following year he was diagnosed with (then incurable) Pulmonary Tuberculosis and spent six months in hospital in Kirkwall, Orkney's main town.
Around this time, he began writing poetry, and also prose for the Orkney Herald for which he became Stromness Correspondent, reporting events such as the switching on of the electricity grid in 1947. In 1950 he met the poet Edwin Muir, a fellow Orcadian, who recognised Mackay Brown's talent for writing, and would become his literary tutor and mentor at Newbattle Abbey College, in Midlothian, which he attended in 1951-2. Recurring TB forced Mackay Brown to spend the following year in hospital, but his experience at Newbattle spurred him to apply to Edinburgh University, to read English Literature, returning to do post-graduate work on Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In later life Mackay Brown rarely left Orkney. He turned to writing full-time, publishing his first collection of poetry, The Storm, in 1954. His writing explored life on Orkney, and the history and traditions which make up Orkney's distinct cultural identity. Many of his works are concerned with protecting Orkney's cultural heritage from the relentless march of progress and the loss of myth and archaic ritual in the modern world. Reflecting this, his best known work is Greenvoe (1972), in which the permanence of island life is threatened by 'Black Star', a mysterious nuclear development.
Mackay Brown's literary reputation grew steadily. He received an OBE in 1974 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1977, in addition to gaining several honorary degrees. His final novel, Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) was Booker Prize shortlisted and judged Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society. Mackay Brown died in his home town of Stromness on 13th April 1996.
He produced several poetry collections, five novels, eight collections of short stories and two poem-plays, as well as non-fiction portraits of Orkney, an autobiography, For the Islands I Sing (1997), and published journalism.
Read more at:
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org....
A bout of severe measles at the age of 12 became the basis for recurring health problems throughout his life. Uncertain as to his future, he remained in education until 1940, a year which brought with it a growing reality of the war, and the unexpected death of his father. The following year he was diagnosed with (then incurable) Pulmonary Tuberculosis and spent six months in hospital in Kirkwall, Orkney's main town.
Around this time, he began writing poetry, and also prose for the Orkney Herald for which he became Stromness Correspondent, reporting events such as the switching on of the electricity grid in 1947. In 1950 he met the poet Edwin Muir, a fellow Orcadian, who recognised Mackay Brown's talent for writing, and would become his literary tutor and mentor at Newbattle Abbey College, in Midlothian, which he attended in 1951-2. Recurring TB forced Mackay Brown to spend the following year in hospital, but his experience at Newbattle spurred him to apply to Edinburgh University, to read English Literature, returning to do post-graduate work on Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In later life Mackay Brown rarely left Orkney. He turned to writing full-time, publishing his first collection of poetry, The Storm, in 1954. His writing explored life on Orkney, and the history and traditions which make up Orkney's distinct cultural identity. Many of his works are concerned with protecting Orkney's cultural heritage from the relentless march of progress and the loss of myth and archaic ritual in the modern world. Reflecting this, his best known work is Greenvoe (1972), in which the permanence of island life is threatened by 'Black Star', a mysterious nuclear development.
Mackay Brown's literary reputation grew steadily. He received an OBE in 1974 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1977, in addition to gaining several honorary degrees. His final novel, Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) was Booker Prize shortlisted and judged Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society. Mackay Brown died in his home town of Stromness on 13th April 1996.
He produced several poetry collections, five novels, eight collections of short stories and two poem-plays, as well as non-fiction portraits of Orkney, an autobiography, For the Islands I Sing (1997), and published journalism.
Read more at:
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org....
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 12, 2024
George Mackay Brown barely left his native Orkney islands. Tuberculosis kept him out of the Second World War; poetic inspiration at home kept him from working elsewhere. He tackles myth, religion, history and humanity with reference to the little span of world within thirty square miles of his place of birth; as Seamus Heaney, his great admirer, said, he passes everything ‘through the eye of the needle of Orkney’.
His poetry from the very beginning is peopled by the fishermen, crofters and island folk around him: Brown sees poetry as a social thing, something that emerges from a community and that is inhabited by it. When he imagines the Norse past (which he does often), the Vikings are painted in similar terms – simple, concrete, salty, as in his depiction of the death of a Norse poet:
His descriptions are frequently very beautiful. We hear that ‘lovers / Unblessed by steeples, lay under / The buttered bannock of the moon’; elsewhere, on the shore, ‘the praying sea / Knelt on the stones’. He can set a tone in a just a few economical words, as in the opening to one of his paeans to fishermen:
As in his prose, there is a strong sense of the continuity of time, and of the poet's role in joining past and future together. In ‘To a Hamnavoe Poet of 2093’, Brown speaks in passing of the traditions he has seen vanish through his lifetime and those that may still be lost:
Certainly the rain-trail from hill to hill is still very much in evidence on Orkney, as it swept over Wideford and Cuween as I sat outside my hut, facing the North Atlantic, finishing this book and starting to understand why he never left.
His poetry from the very beginning is peopled by the fishermen, crofters and island folk around him: Brown sees poetry as a social thing, something that emerges from a community and that is inhabited by it. When he imagines the Norse past (which he does often), the Vikings are painted in similar terms – simple, concrete, salty, as in his depiction of the death of a Norse poet:
The priest has given me oil and bread, a sweet cargo.
Ragnhild my daughter will cross my hands.
The boy Ljot must ring the bell.
I have said to Erling Saltfingers, Drop my harp
Through a green wave, off Yesnaby,
Next time you row to the lobsters.
His descriptions are frequently very beautiful. We hear that ‘lovers / Unblessed by steeples, lay under / The buttered bannock of the moon’; elsewhere, on the shore, ‘the praying sea / Knelt on the stones’. He can set a tone in a just a few economical words, as in the opening to one of his paeans to fishermen:
Midnight. The wind yawing nor-east.
A low blunt moon.
Unquiet beside quiet wives we rest.
As in his prose, there is a strong sense of the continuity of time, and of the poet's role in joining past and future together. In ‘To a Hamnavoe Poet of 2093’, Brown speaks in passing of the traditions he has seen vanish through his lifetime and those that may still be lost:
I hoard, before time's waste
Old country images: plough-horse,
Skylark, grass-growth,
Corn-surge, dewfall, anvil;
Rain-trail from hill to hill, a hushing;
Mayburn a penny whistle
Lilting from Croval, lingering
(Tinker-boy) under my window;
Creel-scattering gales; Thor's
Hammer studdering, on Hoy.
Certainly the rain-trail from hill to hill is still very much in evidence on Orkney, as it swept over Wideford and Cuween as I sat outside my hut, facing the North Atlantic, finishing this book and starting to understand why he never left.
October 29, 2022
Just what was needed: something more compact than a collected poems, and an improvement on the less-than-satisfying selection Brown made in his lifetime. His work has a timeless feel: by never trying to be up to date, Brown never goes out of date. And he has John Clare’s gift of letting things sing for themselves without the author fiddling with the mike.
Favourites:
Prologue
The Storm
The Tramp
The Old Women
The Death of Peter Esson
Hamnavoe
Elegy
Daffodils
The Funeral of Ally Flett
The Poet
The Year of the Whale
Taxman
Haddock Fishermen
Beachcomber
The Ballad of John Barleycorn
A Work for Poets (‘Carve the runes / Then be content with silence.’)
Favourites:
Prologue
The Storm
The Tramp
The Old Women
The Death of Peter Esson
Hamnavoe
Elegy
Daffodils
The Funeral of Ally Flett
The Poet
The Year of the Whale
Taxman
Haddock Fishermen
Beachcomber
The Ballad of John Barleycorn
A Work for Poets (‘Carve the runes / Then be content with silence.’)
August 27, 2025
My understanding is that Mackay Brown is to Scottish schools a bit like what Heaney is to Northern Irish schools, and indeed ‘Hamnavoe’ and ‘Them at Isbister’ have much of the teachable quality of ‘Digging’ or ‘Mid-Term Break’. But reading this collection I thought much more of Patrick Kavanagh than Heaney: ‘Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. | He said: I made the Iliad from such | A local row.’ The conflicts in Mackay Brown’s best poems remained resolutely local and Orcadian, and he never really managed to contribute to the Catholic rebuilding of ‘Knox-ruined’ Scotland he envisaged in his earliest work; this was probably for the best. My appreciation of the poems was hugely enhanced by reading Peter Marshall's Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney, which provides both the conventional historiography that Mackay Brown was so often echoing or reacting against, and also a modern corrective.
March 10, 2025
Rich and earthy. Sometimes leaning a little hard on abstraction. Like all collections of poetry, not all resonate. However, a strong and worthy collection.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews