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 over 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 resonant poetry is collected in one volume, making available again many poems that are otherwise out of print.
Here, his rich resonant poetry is collected in one volume, making available again many poems that are otherwise out of print.
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Reviews
A dazzling writer
Undoubtedly the most important document of his work to be produced so far.
Extraordinarily effective
A brilliant writer
George Mackay Brown really does possess the magician's touch
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
The Collected Poems show the range and depth of his work, the beauty of it, "the undersong of terrible holy joy"
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.
Practically every poem has the bite of originality
'Mackay Brown was a bardic, celebratory poet who swathed all that he wrote about in a kind of caul of sacredness'
'A must-have... [Mackay Brown] transforms the mundane with a luminous lyricism'
'The work has both a severe beauty and mischievous wit'