The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown

Author: George Mackay Brown
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780719565533
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 547

Book Description
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 during 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 and resonant poetry is collected in one volume, making available again many poems that are otherwise out of print.

The Collected Poems

Author: Sylvia Plath
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062669451
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath’s complete poetic works, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes. By the time of her death on 11, February 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity. So this book contains not merely what verse she saved, but—after 1956—all she wrote. — Ted Hughes, from the Introduction

Carve the Runes

Author: George Mackay Brown
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 1788854675
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
In this new Selected Poems, Kathleen Jamie explores the multi-faceted world of George Mackay Brown's Orkney, the poet's lifelong home and inspiration. George Mackay Brown's concerns were the ancestral world, the communalities of work, the fables and religious stories which he saw as underpinning mortal lives. Brown believed from the outset that poets had a social role and his true task was to fulfil that role. This is not the attitude of a shrinking violet, tentatively exploring his 'voice'. Art was sprung from the community, and his role as poet to know that community, to sing its stories. But there was also room for introspection; the poet's task was simultaneously to 'interrogate silence'.

Vinland

Author: George Mackay Brown
Publisher: John Murray
ISBN: 1848549407
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
In his fourth novel, George Mackay Brown takes us to an Orkney torn between its Viking past and its Christian future. Set in the early 11th Century, it tells the story of Ranald Sigmundson, who turns his back on a successful life of political intrigues and battles to design a ship to take him on a journey even greater than the first great voyage of his life, the one to Vinland.

The Storm and Other Poems

Author: George Mackay Brown
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781903385661
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
George Mackay Brown's first book of poems, reprinted with illustrations from Orkney.

Beside the Ocean of Time

Author: George Mackay Brown
Publisher: Calgary : Bayeux Arts
ISBN: 9781896209128
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
1994 Booker Prize short-listed story of Thorfinn Ragnarson's dreams re-living his birthplace.

An Orkney Tapestry

Author: George Mackay Brown
Publisher: Polygon
ISBN: 9781846974809
Category : Orkney (Scotland)
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
First published in 1969, An Orkney Tapestry, George Mackay Brown's seminal work, is a unique look at Orkney through the eye of a poet. Originally commissioned by his publisher as an introduction to the Orkney Islands, Brown approached the writing from a unique perspective and went on to produce a rich fusion of ballad, folk tale, short story, drama and environmental writing. The book, written at an early stage in the author's career, explores themes that appear in his later work and was a landmark in Brown's development as a writer. Above all, it is a celebration of Orkney's people, language and history. This edition reproduces Sylvia Wishart's beautiful illustrations, commissioned for the original hardback.Made available again for the first time in over 40 years, this new edition sits alongside Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain as an important precursor of environmental writing by the likes of Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Malachy Tallack and, most recently, Amy Liptrot.

For the Islands I Sing

Author: George MacKay Brown
Publisher: Polygon
ISBN: 9781846975110
Category : Authors, Scottish
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
George's memory is inseparable from Orkney, where he was born the youngest child of a poor family and which he rarely left. His mother was a beautiful woman who spoke only Gaelic and his father was a wit, mimic and singer, who also doubled as postman and tailor. Tuberculosis framed George's early life and kept him in a kind of limbo. He discovered alcohol which gave him insights into the workings of the mind. While attending the University of Edinburgh he came into contact with Goodsir Smith, MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig - and Stella Cartwright with whom perhaps all of them were in love.By the time of his death in 1996 he was recognised as one of the great writers of his time and country.

Collected Poems

Author: Robert Rendall
Publisher: Steve Savage Publishers Limited
ISBN: 9781904246367
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
Robert Rendall was one of Orkney's best 20th-century poets. This collection includes all the poems in Rendall's four books plus many unpublished poems.

Following A Lark

Author: George Mackay Brown
Publisher: John Murray
ISBN: 184854944X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 94

Book Description
A country boy creeps unwillingly to school on a lark-filled summer morning. Norse crusaders, preparing to sail on Earl Rognvald's crusade in 1151 break into the burial chamber at Maeshowe seeking treasure, and cut runes in its massive stones. And the famous Iceland poet Thorbjorn leaves his farm to join the group of poets whose lyrics stud like gems that famous pilgrimage. The ancient northern ceremonies of solstice and equinox, Easter and Yule, are brought to vivid life in the poems collected in this book, and so also are some of the holidays of the Christian calender. The cycle of seasons is more noticeable in the north, especially perhaps winter, the time of story-telling and music. There are tributes to the great poet of winter, Robert Burns, and a celebration of the Irish veteran of the Peninsular War who founded a tavern in Orkney in 1821. The life of an islander is 'sweetly compacted' in The Laird and the Three Women.