Many of the places, people, legends and seasons that formed Brown's vision and work are presented here, with poems appearing among the prose. Included are memoirs of his parents, friends and passing strangers with legends and stories of the places.
In this novel set on the fictitious island of Norday in the Orkneys, George Mackay Brown beckons us into the imaginary world of the young Thorfinn Ragnarson, the son of a crofter. In his day-dreams he relives the history of this island people, travelling back in time to join Viking adventurers at the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople, then accompanying a Falstaffian knight to the battle of Bannockburn. Thorfinn wakes to the twentieth century and a community whose way of life, steeped in legend and tradition, has remained unchanged for centuries. But as the boy grows up - and falls in love with a vivacious and mysterious stranger - the transforming effect of modern civilization brings momentous and irreversible changes to the island. During the Second World War Thorfinn finds himself in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and it is here that he discovers his gifts as a writer. Long afterwards he returns, now a successful novelist, to a deserted and battle-scarred island. Searching for the peace and freedom of mind he had in abundance as a child, he finds instead something he didn't even know he was looking for. George Mackay Brown intertwines myth and reality to create a novel of deceptive simplicity. The story of Thorfinn and the island of Norday is a universal and profound one, rooted in the timeless landscape of the Orkneys, the inspiration of all his writing.
A country boy creeps unwillingly to school on a lark-filled summer morning. Norse crusaders, preparing to sail on Earl Rognvald's crusade in 1151 break into the burial chamber at Maeshowe seeking treasure, and cut runes in its massive stones. And the famous Iceland poet Thorbjorn leaves his farm to join the group of poets whose lyrics stud like gems that famous pilgrimage. The ancient northern ceremonies of solstice and equinox, Easter and Yule, are brought to vivid life in the poems collected in this book, and so also are some of the holidays of the Christian calender. The cycle of seasons is more noticeable in the north, especially perhaps winter, the time of story-telling and music. There are tributes to the great poet of winter, Robert Burns, and a celebration of the Irish veteran of the Peninsular War who founded a tavern in Orkney in 1821. The life of an islander is 'sweetly compacted' in The Laird and the Three Women.
These unknown and sometimes unexpected poems by the Orcadian master have all his characteristic simplicity and power. In these poems readers will find new ideas previously unexplored, but they will also find those qualities that made George Mackay Brown different from anyone else.
First published in 1969, An Orkney Tapestry, George Mackay Brown's seminal work, is a unique look at Orkney through the eye of a poet. Originally commissioned by his publisher as an introduction to the Orkney Islands, Brown approached the writing from a unique perspective and went on to produce a rich fusion of ballad, folk tale, short story, drama, and environmental writing. The book, written at an early stage in the author’s career, explores themes that appear in his later work and was a landmark in Brown’s development as a writer. Above all, it is a celebration of Orkney's people, language and history. This edition reproduces Sylvia Wishart’s beautiful illustrations, commissioned for the original hardback. Made available again for the first time in over 40 years, this new edition sits alongside Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain as an important precursor of environmental writing by the likes of Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Malachy Tallack and, most recently, Amy Liptrot.
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.
In this new Selected Poems, Kathleen Jamie explores the multi-faceted world of George Mackay Brown's Orkney, the poet's 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. This is not the attitude of a shrinking violet, tentatively exploring his 'voice'. Art was sprung from the community, and his role as poet to know that community, to sing its stories. But there was also room for introspection; the poet's task was simultaneously to 'interrogate silence'.
A compilation of poetry written by George Mackay Brown over a 30-year period, which represents his favourite work. These poems reflect the richness of the Orkney Island community where he lives - a community permeated with its past and still close to the natural world.
This collection of sharply-etched fables, dealing with death, legend, love and violence create an Orcadian world that spanning myth and reality - a world set firmly between the sea and the sky - a collection of islands which are life-sustaining and soul refreshing.
This collection of the poetry of George Mackay Brown centres on the theme of journeys - including an ill-fated 19th century trip ending off the Orkney island of Westray, from which the book takes its title.
The author's beloved Orkney is brought vividly to life in this classic collection, peopled with crofters, fishermen, ferrymen and tinkers. History plays a part too, for Norse and Scottish legend are revived in tales of witch trials, priest hunts and Viking raids, all endowed with the stark beauty of George Mackay Brown's masterful storytelling.
The small Orcadian community of Greevoe has remained unchanged for generations. Now a shady government project, Operation Black Star, threatens to destroy the islander's way of life. George Mackay Brown's first novel describes a week in the life of the islanders as the come to terms with the repercussions of Operation Black Star in a masterful mix of prose and poetry from one of Scotland's greatest writers.
George Mackay Brown wrote this memoir in the years before his death in 1996, but he did not want it published while he lived. Here we see the author's simple, bardic honesty turned on himself. In particular, he looks at Orkney, where he was born the youngest child in a poor family, and which he rarely left.
An incident from the Viking period in the Northern Isles of Scotland inspired the story from which this collection takes its name. The stories range from the first century, to the 1920s - when the author was a child - to one which ends a hundred years from now.
George Mackay Brown was a master of the short story form and produced a steady stream of short fiction collections, starting with A Calendar of Love (1967) and include A Time to Keep (1969) and Hawkfall (1974), as well as his poetry collections and novels. In this selection, edited and introduced by Malachy Tallack, we explore the author's Orkney and the ups and downs of the crofters and fishermen there. These magical stories, drawn from ancient lore and modern life, strip life down to the essentials.
This collection celebrates winter and its festivals, light and darkness. It includes the tales of Lieutenant William Bligh at the port of Hamnavoe, an Edinburgh man rediscovering his roots in Shetland, Baltic-men shipwrecked on the Orkney coast, and Norse warriors setting out for the Holy Land. Through these stories George Mackay Brown explores the effects of new ways of thinking and working on the ancient patterns and traditions of Orkney life.
These two long stories are set, like most of George Mackay Brown's work, in Orkney and in a period, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the pattern of island life, little changed since Viking times, was beginning to be threatened. The Golden Bird tells the story of the slow decline of an island community: a scattered village dependant on the sea for its livelihood and at risk from it, a place subject to the peculiar tensions of isolation and the unsettling influence of new values. The Life and Death of John Voe looks at the life of a typical young Orkney man: after whaling and sailing and gold-mining he comes home to devote the rest of his days to a beautiful country girl. These stories are the creation of a very rich imagination, of a practised and skillful writer, but they also have the power and simplicity of the traditional ballad. They will delight Mackay Brown's fans.
In these six stories George Mackay Brown leads us back along the sweep of Orkney's past and beyond even that to the remoteness of fable. He reveals the timelessness of the lived moment and the constants of island life in the harvest of sea and land and the compulsions of voyage and homecoming.
The Island of the Women" is George Mackay Brown's posthumously published collection of short stories, released in 1998, two years after the author's death. Like his previous collections, "A Time to Keep" and "A Calendar of Love," this volume explores Brown's concerns with history, spirituality, legend and storytelling.
In his fourth novel, George Mackay Brown takes us to an Orkney torn between its Viking past and its Christian future. Set in the early 11th Century, it tells the story of Ranald Sigmundson, who turns his back on a successful life of political intrigues and battles to design a ship to take him on a journey even greater than the first great voyage of his life, the one to Vinland.
When the shopkeeper gives Jenny a skinny, black kitten she has no idea who she has adopted. Fankle is no ordinary cat. The fiercely clever feline has lived six lives so far: lives of adventure, danger, fortune and poverty. He's stared down angry pirates, started a blood feud, won a war, advised an empress and leapt onto the moon. Fankle tells Jenny tales of his former lives -- with the king of pirates, in ancient Egypt and even with the Empress of China. So what is he doing living in a crofter's cottage in Orkney? This classic novel by George Mackay Brown is a rich and rewarding read for adults and children alike.
First published in 1969, "A Time to Keep" has a vast cast of characters drawn from Orkney's past and present. The stories offer a range of emotions and incidents, exploring how the new and old collide and crash in a community as deeply rooted as Orkney's.
The second collection of stories published by George Mackay Brown, this volume includes 12 stories arising from both ancient and modern life on the island of Orkney.
This collection of the poetry of George Mackay Brown, whose most recent work was a volume of short stories entitled The Masked Fisherman, centres on the theme of journeys - including an ill-fated 19th century trip ending off the Orkney island of Westray, from which the book takes its title.
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