Travellers: Poems

From Booklist
Often volumes of previously uncollected work by prolific authors seem to be published just for the sake of completeness. Not so with this gathering of poems by the late Orkney writer. Although they don't disclose hitherto hidden aspects of Brown, but are of a piece with the poems in the books he himself prepared, they aren't inferior or scrappy. They are polished accomplishments, neither a word too short nor one too long. They have the tang of salt, the must of good soil, the sting of the North Atlantic wind, and the warmth of an ancient community--qualities informing and animating everything Brown, a poet of place if ever there was one, wrote. Many of them are occasional, written for weddings, memorials, dedications, and other events. Several take up the Catholic poet's beloved Easter and Christmas yet again. A suite of them gives voice to the sorrows and the joys of "The Sons and Daughters of Barleycorn." Virtually all touch on the history and the age-old industries--farming and fishing--of Orkney. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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"Travellers" offers a new selection of George Mackay Brown's poems collected here for the first time and edited by Archie Bevan and Brian Murray. Many of them were never published in his lifetime.
The large and growing numer of those who love his poems will know that in this book they will find the simplicity and directness that convey not less but more. They know too that George Mackay Brown, seemingly remote in Orkney, nevertheless responded to a vast range of the world's experience. Even so, there are unexpected treats to be found here. As always the seasons of the year and of life yield new and fresh magic in his hands: but it is more of a surprise to encounter Tolstoy, or Modigliani, or refugees from Tibet, or the people of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, or the great uranium controversy that threatened to engulf the islands. Haiku and chinoiseries are departures of a different kind, though it is true that Brown's essential poetical vision does not change, rather that these forms are transmuted and become personal to him.
In these poems readers will find new ideas previously unexplored, but they will also find those qualities that made George Mackay Brown different from anyone else.


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