George Mackay Brown is recognised as one of Scotland's greatest twentieth-century lyric poets. His work is integral to the flowering of Scottish literature during the last fifty years. Admired by many fellow poets, including Seamus Heaney and Douglas Dunn, his poems are deeply individual and unmistakable in their setting: 'the small green world' of the Orkney Islands where he lived for most of his life, with its elemental forces of sea and sky and Norse and Icelandic ancestry, is brought vividly and memorably to life. Here, his rich and resonant poetry is collected in one volume, making available again many poems that are otherwise out of print.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
'The Collected Poems is a rich gift. ... This much-needed volume is a testament to the inspiration of a distinctive poet who lived on the margins yet saw into the centre.' -- Herald, Ron Ferguson 'If it's good enough for Seamus Heaney, it's good enough for you.' -- The List, Brian Donaldson 'He combines great imagination, which takes him into the realms of the mystical, with a firm rooting in reality and a deep understanding of humanity' -- The Spectator 'A Northern Homer' -- James Ferguson, poet 'Brown's vision encompasses the whole of Orkney's history in one harmonious weave.' -- Sunday Herald, Alan Taylor 'This is certainly an impressive volume' -- The Tablet 20050806 'Deeply personal, yet never parochial ... The text is allowed to speak for itself.' -- Daily Mail (Scottish) 20050715 'By my bed is The Collected Poems"...I open it often and each time it reinforces my feelings about the country that I love' -- Sunday Herald, Kirsty Wark 20051127 'Extraordinarily effective' -- Robert McCrum, The Observer 'A brilliant writer' -- Spectator 'George Mackay Brown really does possess the magician's touch' -- Observer 'A dazzling writer' -- The Guardian 'Undoubtedly the most important document of his work to be produced so far.' -- Shetland Times, Malachy Tallack. 'George Mackay Brown has added uniquely and steadfastly to the riches of poetry in English: his sense of the world and his way with words are powerfully at one with each other' -- Seamus Heaney 'The Collected Poems show the range and depth of his work, the beauty of it, "the undersong of terrible holy joy"' -- Scotsman 20050730 'The reader embarks on a voyage -- which is how Mackay Brown himself saw his work -- through the elemental world of his cliff-girt, craggy isles.' -- The Times, Rachel Campbell-Johnston 20050730 'Practically every poem has the bite of originality' -- TLS 20050812 'Mackay Brown was a bardic, celebratory poet who swathed all that he wrote about in a kind of caul of sacredness' -- Independent, Michael Glover 20051202 'A must-have... [Mackay Brown] transforms the mundane with a luminous lyricism' -- The Times, Rachel Campbell-Johnston 20051203 'The work has both a severe beauty and mischievous wit' -- The Sunday Times 20051203 'Collected Poems" brings into one large volume Mackay Brown's treasury of virtually all of his published poetic work over almost half a century...It is glorious.' -- Scottish Life (US glossy) 20051201 'The editors! have done a first-rate job in assembling the various collections and stray pieces into one magnificent whole' -- Maurice Fleming, Scots Magazine 20060401
About the Author
George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness in the Orkney Islands in 1921 and died there in 1996. His novel 'Beside the Ocean of Time' was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. The editors of this collected volume are uniquely qualified. Archie Bevan is George Mackay Brown's literary executor and Brian Murray is co-author of 'Interrogation of Silence', a critical study of the works of George Mackay Brown, published by John Murray in 2004.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Songs of an Orkney Bard,
By Nathan Wirth "University composition teacher" (San Francisco, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown (Paperback)
In an effort to perfect his craft, George Mackay Brown often wrote about the same themes: the meeting of the Viking world and the Christian World, the violence of the past and the present, solitude, silence, and other such concerns. Magnus, a 12th Century Orkney saint, is at the center of much of his work and reappears again and again in his prose, poetry, and essays. That said-- despite the recurring themes, Brown was a wonderful, gifted poet that had a real talent for image, meter, the symbol, and a senseof the Orkney life-- both past and present. As Seamus Heaney once said, "his sense of the world and his way with words are powerfully one with each other." Indeed, Brown fine tuned his craft writing about the lives, history, and stories of the Orkney people, a people steeped in both a rich and violent past, a past that reflects the present with alarming clarity. A worthy collection-- some previously unreleased by Brown-- of poems from a poet who should be better known in the United States.Brown, in his lifetime, often made odd choices and exclusions from his various selected poems. This volume sets everything right, bringing many of those worthy, excluded poems to the forefront where they belong.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown,
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This review is from: The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown (Paperback)
Owen Sheers presented a BBC programme on Poets of Great Britain which introduced a terrific poet to a wider audience, George Mackay Brown. This book is his collected poems and contains many small gems of a master craftsman of the English language. Definitely worth buying this book. Especially I like "Agricultural Show: Dounby", the last stanza is wonderful :"That hill of blond surges, they hallow Tomorrow's harvester. And see, The horse we banished from our hills Drifts delicately to his handful of grass."
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