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  • George Mackay Brown
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George Mackay Brown

1921 - 1996

George Mackay Brown © Gordon Wright (image used under strict permission)
POEMS BIBLIOGRAPHY CRITICISM

‘When all the dancers and masks had gone inside
His cold stare
Returned to its true task, interrogation of silence.’

George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney, on 17 October 1921. He was educated at Stromness Academy, Newbattle Abbey College (1951-52) and Edinburgh University, from which he graduated MA in 1960. He received an MA from the Open University in 1976. His many awards include a Society of Authors Travel Award, 1968; SAC Literature Prize, 1969; Katherine Mansfield Menton Short Story Prize, 1971;  Hon. LLD from Dundee University, 1977; OBE, 1974; James Tait  Black Memorial Prize 1987 (for The Golden Bird). He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel Beside the Ocean of Time.

Mackay Brown was the youngest of six children of John Brown, tailor and postman, and Mhairi Mackay, a Gaelic speaker. He grew up in fairly straitened circumstances as his father was unable to work through illness. Mackay Brown himself suffered from tuberculosis as a young man. In his twenties he worked as a journalist on the Orkney Herald, but at the age of thirty left Orkney to study at Newbattle Abbey College, near Edinburgh, where he met Edwin Muir, who was Warden at the time, a meeting that had a profound influence on him. Muir encouraged his writing and wrote the introduction to Mackay Brown’s first full collection of poems. He went on to study English at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1960. He did some post-graduate research on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In Edinburgh he fell in with the Milne’s Bar crowd: Sydney Goodsir Smith, Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, et al., and became briefly engaged to Stella Cartwright, the muse of Milne’s; they kept in touch by correspondence until her death in 1985. Mackay Brown never married. After graduation he began teacher training but ill health forced him to give up and he returned to Orkney and to Stromness (the ‘Hamnavoe’ of his poems and stories). His second book of poems, Loaves and Fishes, published in 1959, was a critical success. In 1961 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, which became a great source of inspiration, especially in its liturgical and ceremonial aspects.

A settled home, which he rarely left, a settled religion, which he loved – and a dram or two – were to sustain him and his writing till his death in Stromness on 13 April 1996. He wrote regularly for the local newspaper – lively articles and essays –  produced several short story volumes (some say his best work), and novels, and of course the poems on which his reputation rests.

He once wrote (in Contemporary Poets, 1980) that his themes were ‘mainly religious (birth, love, death, resurrection, ceremonies of fishing and agriculture)’, that the verse forms he used were ‘traditional stanza forms, sonnets, ballads, vers libre, prose poems, runes, choruses, etc.’ and his sources and influences were ‘Norse sagas, Catholic rituals and ceremonies, island lore’ – which seems a pretty fair summing-up of his position. But it was a position which meant he was basically opposed to modern life, to the values of capitalist materialism, to Progress, which he characterised as ‘a rootless utilitarian faith, without beauty or mystery’. (‘Tomorrow is the day of the long lead pipe.’) As a consequence he has been accused of escapism, of backward looking, to an alleged Eden, like Muir, but in his defence it must be said that island fishing and farming communities (as in Fishermen with Ploughs) are just as valid a subject for exploring humanity as industrial cities – folk are folk. Or he might have echoed Iain Crichton Smith (writing from Oban): ‘Let those who love the city deal with them [the problems of the city]’.

He carried out this exploration in crystal clear language and images. Litany and ritual combine with sharp, often humorous, observation of people and the seasons in poems memorable and moving for their ‘austere, elegiac beauty’ (Keith Harrison).  However, as Roderick Watson has pointed out in The Literature of Scotland: the twentieth century (2007), ‘the poet’s cyclical themes do tend to lead always to the “same people”, until the timeless is in danger of becoming merely static.’  It can be argued that his somewhat narrow range limits his appeal, but it cannot be denied that Mackay Brown remained true to his Orkney muse and to himself. His poetic creed is in the words on his gravestone (taken from the poem ‘A Work for Poets’): ‘Carve the runes / Then be content with silence’.

 

2012

Read more

Read the poems

  • Beachcomber
  • The Year of the Whale
  • Hamnavoe Market
  • Taxman
  • The Finished House

Selected Bibliography

The Storm and Other Poems (Kirkwall: Orkney Press, 1954)
Loaves and Fishes (London: Hogarth Press, 1959)
The Year of the Whale (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965)
An Orkney Tapestry (London: Gollancz, 1969) [non-fiction]
Fishermen with Ploughs (London: Hogarth Press, 1971)
Poems New and Selected (London: Hogarth Press, 1971)
Winterfold (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976)
Selected Poems (London: Hogarth Press, 1977)
Voyages (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983)
A Celebration for Magnus (Nairn: Balnain Books, 1987)
Portrait of Orkney (London: John Murray, 1998)
The Wreck of the Archangel (London: John Murray, 1989)
Selected Poems 1954-1983 (London: John Murray, 1991)
The Sea-king’s Daughter, and, Eureka! (Nairn: Balnain Books, 1991)
Foresterhill (Schondorf am Ammersee: Babel, 1992)
The Sea and the Tower (Calgary: Bayeux, 1994)
Following a Lark: poems (London: John Murray, 1996)
Orkney: pictures and poems (with Gunnie Moberg) (Grantown-on-Spey: Colin Baxter Photography, 1996)
For the Islands I Sing: an autobiography (London: John Murray, 1997)
Northern Lights: a poet’s sources (London: John Murray, 1999)
Travellers: poems (London: John Murray, 2001)
The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown (London: John Murray, 2005)

Selected Biography & Criticism

Douglas Dunn, Finished Fragrance: The Poems of George Mackay Brown (Poetry Nation 2, 1974)

Philip Pacey, The Fire of Images: The Poetry of George Mackay Brown (Akros 32, 1976)

D. Jones, Swatches from the Weave of Time: The Work of George Mackay Brown (Planet 40, 1977)

Alan Bold, George Mackay Brown (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1978)

George Mackay Brown, An autobiographical essay in Maurice Lindsay (ed.), As I Remember: ten Scottish authors recall how writing began for them (London: Robert Hale, 1979)

David Annwn, Inhabited voices: myth and history in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney and George Mackay Brown (Frome: Bran’s Head Books, 1984)

Peter Butter, George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir (Yearbook of English Studies 17, 1987)

Special feature on George Mackay Brown, Chapman 60 (April 1990)

Colin Nicolson, Unlocking Time’s Labyrinth: George Mackay Brown in Poem, Purpose and
Place: Shaping Identity in Contemporary Scottish Verse
(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992)

David Annwn, The Binding Breath: island and community in the poetry of George Mackay Brown in Hans-Werner Ludwig and Lothar Fietz (eds), Poetry in the British Isles: non-metropolitan perspectives (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995)

George Mackay Brown: an appreciation [special issue], (Chapman 84, 1996)

Isobel Murray and Bob Tait, ‘A sequence of images: George Mackay Brown’ in Scottish Writers Talking (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996)

Hilda D. Spear (ed.), George Mackay Brown: a survey of his work and a full bibliography (Lewsiton, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2000)

Stewart Conn, Music and muse: George Mackay Brown in Distances: a personal evocation of people and places (Dalkeith: Scottish Cultural Press, 2001)

Sabine Schmid, Keeping the Sources Pure: the making of George Mackay Brown (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003)

Rowena Murray and Brian Murray, Interrogation of Silence: the writings of George Mackay Brown (London: John Murray, 2004)

Christopher Whyte, The 1970s in Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004)

Maggie Fergusson, George Mackay Brown: the life (London: John Murray, 2006)

Gerry Cambridge, The isle full of voices: George Mackay Brown’s poetry in The Dark Horse (No. 18, Summer 2006)

Simon W. Hall, High water: George Mackay Brown in The History of Orkney Literature (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2010)

Ron Ferguson, George Mackay Brown: The Wound and the Gift (St Andrew Press, 2011)

Joanna Ramsey, The Seed Beneath the Snow: Remembering George Mackay Brown (Sandstone Press, 2015)

Further Information

Copyright

The literary estate of George Mackay Brown is represented
by Jenny Brown at Jenny Brown Associates

Manuscripts and papers

National Library of Scotland
University of Edinburgh: George Mackay Brown papers

University of Edinburgh Library is open to all members of the public on production of appropriate proof of identity. This enables you to search and look at materials in the Centre for Research Collections

From the Library Catalogue

Publications about George Mackay Brown
Publications by George Mackay Brown

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