GEORGE
MACKAY BROWN
Reviews and Quotes
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The
Poor Man in his Castle The enchanting and
enchanted story tells of the return to Norday of the laird’s son, on
Christmas Eve. GMB is on form with his descriptions of the island’s
past, the part religion and its ministers played in island life, the
changes good and bad, and the old customs of Johnsmas, Yule and Hogmanay.
He weaves a tale from dream and reality, history and imagination,
leaving his reader once again with the sense
of having witnessed a few rare moments in the island’s past. The Poor Man in his
Castle is available from The Celtic Cross Press at info@celticcrosspress.com price
£40 inc p&p within the |
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Interrogation of
Silence |
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 |
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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
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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
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| 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 |
| 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 |
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Index |