Names Was Made To Be Spoke:
Commemoration in the Poems of Glyn Wright and George Mackay Brown 

by Sheenagh Pugh

The following snippets cannot do justice to the essay which explores – through the unlikely but interesting comparison of the work of Glyn Wright and GMB - the deeper meaning and responsibility of 'naming' in poetry.
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                        At Burnmouth the door hangs from a broken hinge
                        And the fire is out.

                        The windows of Shore empty sockets
                        And the hearth coldness.

                        At Bunnertoon the small drains are choked.
                        Thrushes nest in the chimney.

And so on through the names of eleven deserted crofts, a sonorous roll-call of the absent. This was the untitled poem* in George Mackay Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry, in which he calls the names of the empty houses of Rackwick, each one bestowed by someone who lived there and now the only witness to the fact that they did.

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            It is true too that Mackay Brown enjoyed praising better than denigrating, though he did both when necessary, and this willingness to praise made him seem, especially to critics in love with irony and invective, not sharp or modern enough, less than cutting-edge.

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....  the awesome power and responsibility of naming, of being able to name, of having a voice that can speak and keep names.

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*This poem is published under the title Dead Fires in
Fishermen with Ploughs
published 1971 
and in
Selected Poems 1954 – 1992
published 1991
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd