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Orkney Pictures and Poems
Pictures of Orkney, Scotland by Gunnie Moberg and the poems of George Mackay Brown inspired by those photos.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
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May 28, 2023
Not by George Ernest Brown and not a Pocket Guide (more like a coffee table book).
I appreciated the poems more when I realized they were ekphrastic and the photos next to them were an essential piece of their context. Not used to reading that way. I may have to go back to Part One, now that I know.
Here George Mackay Brown grieves the old ways, the simple life, the poem of the primitive, the integrity of the community. His cold and bleak kind of beauty is a hard sell for me and there's too much slack in some of his poetic lines. This is not a condemnation though. I loved his swans taking refuge from icy water in the magical Atlantic Drift, the sheep finding shelter in a St. Andrew's Cross, the tiny Italian chapel bringing Pax Romana to the very end of the earth. The thrilling note of prophecy that runs through the book: that the ancient, strong, and holy things are just biding their time to be restored. (He sounds a lot like the Catholic Land Movement authors there.)
What are generations
But turnings of the stone pages of time?
112 pages. Lots of white space. Lots of pictures.
I appreciated the poems more when I realized they were ekphrastic and the photos next to them were an essential piece of their context. Not used to reading that way. I may have to go back to Part One, now that I know.
Here George Mackay Brown grieves the old ways, the simple life, the poem of the primitive, the integrity of the community. His cold and bleak kind of beauty is a hard sell for me and there's too much slack in some of his poetic lines. This is not a condemnation though. I loved his swans taking refuge from icy water in the magical Atlantic Drift, the sheep finding shelter in a St. Andrew's Cross, the tiny Italian chapel bringing Pax Romana to the very end of the earth. The thrilling note of prophecy that runs through the book: that the ancient, strong, and holy things are just biding their time to be restored. (He sounds a lot like the Catholic Land Movement authors there.)
What are generations
But turnings of the stone pages of time?
112 pages. Lots of white space. Lots of pictures.
Displaying 1 of 1 review