gmb website - reviews and quotes

Northern Lights
pub 1999
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

He was a scion of crofters and cottars down many generations. . .
by nothing marked out as a genius. Yet that I think is what he was.

. . . his dear friends Archie Bevan and Brian Murray have done us, his readers and scholars, a very great service in letting us see the scaffolding and stones which he used in producing his marvellous body of work.

Drew Ratter
The Shetland Times
16th July 1999

Northern Lights
pub 1999
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

The people of Orkney must sorely miss George Mackay Brown, their very own poet and storyteller, who died three years ago; and not just for his books ...... but for his consoling presence among them . . . .

Ninety pages of this book are devoted not to Orkney but to the neighbouring archipelago of Shetland, islands that the poet had never visited until 1988, when he was persuaded to rise from his sickbed for a 12-day excursion with friends. In these pages, which are a combination of a diary and notebook entries that are described as a search for symbols, Mackay Brown allows his imagination to flow, and just occasionally this intensely private man lets slip a personal view, such as the following, that seems to encapsulate his artistic credo: "To someone like me who sees poetry draining away remorselessly from even the quiet legendary places of the world, as 'the word' loses its power increasingly to the 'number', the richness and strength of a people are not in oil terminals and overfishing (the breaking of the ancient treaty between man and the creatures) and literacy, but in their inheritance from the past, the riches of music and lore and imagination."

Euan Cameron
The Sunday Times
18th July 1999

If an aspiring writer came to me and asked me how to tell a story, plot a book, round a character, make dialogue sing and whisper and bellow, I would say: "Read George Mackay Brown".

Peter Tinniswood

Winter Tales
pub 1995
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

Light and darkness are common themes in these tales, which all have a fireside ambience. It is easy to imagine Mackay Brown . . . enthralling all before him as the peat crackles and another bottle of malt is broached.

The Sunday Express

In this collection the author is at his celebratory and affirmative best. Everything he writes about is rooted in the harsh Orkney landscape, yet is often heart-achingly tender and compassionate.

Yorkshire Post

The Island of the Women and Other Stories
pub 1998
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

A brilliant writer . . . His prose is simple but not naive, lyrical but not whimsical; he combines great imagination, which takes him into the realms of the mystical, with a firm rooting in reality and a deep understanding of humanity.

Kate Grimond
Spectator

W.H. Auden once called poetry "a way of happening" and in the work of George Mackay Brown the way is a fabulous one; he transforms everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney. His sense of the world and his way with words are powerfully at one with each other. His vision has something of the skaldic poet's consciousness of inevitable order, something of the haiku master's susceptibility to the delicate and momentary, and since the beginning of his career he has added uniquely and steadfastly to the riches of poetry in English.

Seamus Heaney

For the Islands I Sing
pub 1997
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

This autobiography charts his own quest in his poetry and prose for the myth beyond the actual and everyday.

Douglas Gifford
The Scotsman

Selected Poems 1954-1992
pub 1991
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

He gives one hope for poetry and the language.

Peter Levi

Greenvoe
pub 1972
The Hogarth Press
1976 Penguin Books

George Mackay Brown is a distinguished poet of the Orkneys, and Greenvoe is a poetic, distinguished and totally delightful Orcadian story . . . full of humour and sensitivity and of the unsentimental poetry of raw experience . . . Mr. Brown brings to the great tradition of English social realism a strong poetic impulse.

Sunday Times

A Time to Keep and other stories
pub Sept 2000, reissued in paperback
John Murray Publishers Ltd.

A brilliant writer ... His prose is simple, but not naive, lyrical not whimsical; he combines great imagination, which takes him into the realms of the mystical, with a firm rooting in reality and a deep understanding of humanity.

Kate Grimond
Spectator

A Calendar of Love and other stories
pub Sept 2000, reissued in paperback
John Murray Publishers Ltd.

[GMB] really does possess the magician's touch: there are few writers today with the courage to be so direct, or with the talent to lighten up the most humdrum detail of an ordinary life and transform it into something unforgettable.

Observer

[His] prose is severely simple and beautiful; he never wastes words, but evokes a complete atmosphere in a phrase.

Scottish Field

Travellers
published February 2001
John Murray Publishers Ltd.

The reading of a poem can give you a privileged insight into the way the author's mind is working, where personal thoughts are conveyed succinctly in a few lines. It can make you think, give you a new slant on a certain situation or perhaps just simply reinforce an idea that was a the back of your mind anyway. It is even more of a privilege when you are able to take a glimpse at work that has only come to the attention of the general public after the author's death.

Archie Bevan and Brian Murray, both lifelong friends of George Mackay Brown, have gathered together and edited a collection of about eighty of his poems, many of which were from unpublished manuscripts or typescripts. Some of them have previously been printed in newspapers or periodicals but there is only one 'December Day, Hoy Sound' which has already appeared in a volume issued by the poet.

Dipping into Travellers, a book of poems by George Mackay Brown, we can share with his friends the delight of discovering another gem and another pearl amongst the paperwork he left behind, as if from a treasure chest that had not seen the light of day in his lifetime and was thought to be lost forever.

There are examples of the poet's own special quality put to new verse forms in haiku and chinoiseries – oriental styles that lend themselves well to his personal reflections or Orkney settings. Poems that explore contemporary issues – victims of war, Tibetan refugees, people of the Balkans – are also there and some come across almost as prayers, willing better times to come.

There are more familiar delvings into the character and lifestyle of the people who lived round about him. To name but two: 'Cragsmen' paints brilliant thumbnail sketches of men working on the cliff face, and 'Old Woman' immediately gives such a vivid portrait that you are struck with awe at how few words you need in order to say a lot.

The collection finishes with a well known character from other poems and stories by George Mackay Brown, 'Ikey, His Will in Winter Written'. In a fanciful moment, you could imagine that this poem, written in the year preceding his death, is really the poet's own last will and testament to us.

Reproduced in full from the April/May 2001 edition [No. 95] of The Orkney View by kind permission of the editor, Anne Cormack, and reviewer, Catharine Pye.

The Wreck of the Archangel

All the work in The Wreck of the Archangel is luminous, articulated with a crackling, concentrated energy.

Jeff Nuttall
Time Out