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Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown

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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.

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."