gmb website - anecdotes

I am a crystallographer by training. A crystallographer is a scientist whose specialty is to study crystals. Crystals or crystalline matter, when exposed to intense x-rays produce a regular patterns of dots. Analysing these patterns of regularly distributed spots, crystallographers can unravel the atomic structure of matter in the crystals. So, what is the connection with GMB?

In August 1999, there was an International Congress of crystallographers from all over the world in Glasgow. Several thousand scientists attended. I took a day off from the sessions of the Congress to visit Edinburgh. I walked along the historic mile with special interest in the cathedral. The castle did not interest me at all. On a side alley, I discovered something interesting: 'Writers Museum'. I walked into the house, visited the different rooms and up the stairs there was a special exhibit of a poet totally unknown to me until them. The name was
quite plain: George Mackay Brown. What immediately caught my attention were those two poignant lines:

See this tall finger of science
Scratch the stars out! [1]

As a scientist, I felt as if I was – personally – the one scratching with my own fingernails the stars out of the sky. I was hooked! Why is he saying that?

Who is this George Mackay Brown anyway?

I had encountered 'anti-science' poems before. From the disappointment of J. Keats in the poem Lamia, where he laments that Mr. Newton was 'Unweaving the Rainbow' by explaining it, to the boring explanations that Mr. Walt Whitman had to endure by the 'Learned Astronomer' [poem When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer included in Leaves of Grass]. However, this graphic description of the effect of science in our world sounded so desperate that I had to learn more about the poet writing such an outcry.

Before my departure from Scotland, I purchased several books by GMB and once at home in Lake Forest, Illinois (USA) I ordered – and subsequently treasured – ORKNEY, Pictures & Poems by GMB and Gunnie Moberg. The combination of images and poems is magnificent.

Being a writer myself, I could not resist including in my book a brief poem of GMB in relation to the definition of poetry:

    The minglings of sea and earth
    Creel and plough
    Fish and cornstalk
    Shore people and shepherds
    Are the warp and weft that go
    To make the very stuff of poetry. [2]

Dr. Cele Abad-Zapatero, protein crystallographer, published 'Crystals and Life: A Personal Journey' in 2002 [International University Line, La Jolla, CA. USA]

GMB References:

[1] from Flotta Flare Orkney: Pictures and Poems, 1996 and 1998,
published by Colin Baxter Photography

[2] quote from the introduction by GMB to:
George Mackay Brown, Selected Poems 1954-1992
published enlarged edition 1996, reprinted 1998
by John Murray Publishers Ltd.
Used on the poster for an exhibition.

My grandfather, John Taylor of Bathgate, Birsay, was 80 in July 1994. I wanted to do something special for his birthday, and eventually hit on the idea of asking GMB to write some form of celebratory poem dedicated to Mr. Taylor.

I had never previously had any contact whatsoever with GMB, although my mother was two years behind him at Stromness Academy. However I wrote to him with my request and was delighted to receive a response within a week.

He returned the birthday card which I'd hopefully enclosed. On it he'd written an acrostic poem. GMB ignored my request to name his fee.

Accordingly when visited Orkney that summer, I took with a me a case of 'Brains Beer'. When I called to deliver it, he invited me in and was hospitality itself.

C.J. Buttwell

John Taylor, Birsay
80th Birthday

John at Batgarth, Birsay
On your 80th birthday your grandson Colin Buttwell in Wales
Has bidden me
Note down a few acrostic line, in celebration.

That's a beautiful part of Orkney, or of
Anywhere on earth, to stay. May
You still be
Lifting the latch of your door
On your hundredth birthday. But today let family and friends sit
Round your fire, raising glasses of Barleycorn to you.

George Mackay Brown
Stromness 23.5.94

Note: In the poem, GMB changed the place name from Bathgate to Batgarth, showing his preference for the old names. Batgarth means a small farm, and it is likely that this is simply a name coined by GMB from various sources.
Hugh Marwick notes that in a map dated 1760, Bathgate appears as Batkieth, a small quoy or piece of enclosed cultivated land. So GMB might well have coined 'Batquoy' which would have looked back to Norn derivation. Perhaps the existence of Buckquoy nearby in Birsay would have been confusing and so he settled for Batgarth. All this is happy conjecture, of course.