Book Review, 06 August 2005
Reviewed by Robert Nye

Poet’s exile in an island Eden

The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown
Ed. Archie Bevan and Brian Murray
John Murray, £35
Tablet bookshop price £31.50 Tel 01420 592974

The poet George Mackay Brown would sometimes pop into my flat in Edinburgh for breakfast before he caught the coach back north. He was a shy, soft-spoken, frail, mop-headed creature, never at ease in the big city. I recall only two things from his conversation. The first is that he would punctuate his sentences with Christian names, as though having to remind himself that other people existed. The second is that this litany was further complicated by what seemed like an obsession with numbers. Thus, over coffee, we’d hear something like: “Robert, thank you for those three rashers which Aileen kindly fried for me, and the two eggs, Robert, and these four slices of Aileen’s delicious toast.” At the time (this would have been in the early 1970s, when George was in his prime) I wondered if such speech habits were Orcadian. Perhaps they were, a bit, but I think of them now as absolutely Brownian.

The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown gives everyone a chance to hear again the voice to which such words were second nature. Running to well over 500 pages of verse in smallish print, sometimes with several short poems on the one page, this is certainly an impressive volume. Its industry seems almost Victorian. I cannot think of another twentieth-century English-language poet who wrote so much about so little.

Brown was, of course, a poet who established a peculiar manner that was all his own, so that if you open this book at random you will hear much the same sort of thing. Something like this, perhaps:

The fishmonger stood at the rock
With bits of dull silver
To trade for torrents of uncaught silver.

That is a whole poem, one of a sequence of Sea Runes, celebrating a scene in which it might not be wrong to see the poet as the fishmonger, though Brown usually cast himself in more heroic roles. Notice that the verse is like speech boiled down to its salt. There is no discernible metrical pattern, no verbal flourish, no hint of deep thought or feeling, and in the repetition of the word “silver” even a sort of carelessness, as if the speaker did not mind if we noticed he was ramming the images home. If this is poetry then we might describe it in the way that Edward Thomas defined the early work of Robert Frost: it is poetry – simply because it is better than prose.

Brown found his subjects, as Frost did, close at hand, in his case in the rocks and tides of Orkney, where he was born in 1922 and where he died in 1996. The past of the island became for him over the years almost a metaphor of Eden. At other times, and more interestingly, he employed its present life and landscapes as metaphors of the human condition in exile from Eden. All the while, he made use of verbal ceremony to persuade his readers that what he had to celebrate was a pattern of images, particularly images of eating and drinking and of death and resurrection, which lie beneath the surface of everyday life, and which might be reconciled with the transformations inherent and explicit in the Eucharist. He was a Catholic convert.

Brown’s best work, though, seems to me to partake of the nature of private rite, rather than public ritual. It comes when his imagination is at one with what it sees, using not so much symbols as signs. That fishmonger on the rock may be the poet, but he is first of all a real fishmonger bargaining with fishermen at the water’s edge for fish they have not yet caught.

The fairest way to indicate the memorable qualities of these poems is by quotation. Here is the beginning of a harp-song, which is supposed to be chanted by a Viking from Shetland in 1263:

I am a farmer from Yell in Shetland.
Bjorn my mother called me.
I grew among seals and clouds and birds and
women.
The men came home in the ships for harvest
With wounds on them and bits of silver.
One year my father did not come home.
The sea has him, off Lindisfarne.
I learned to lift alehorn and hawk that
winter…

In this sort of writing, bones signify bones, nets signify nets, and the sea is the sea. Brown had a gift for being delighted by the actual, and saddened by the particular. Nor should his craft be underestimated; the last line quoted above is his revision of the much weaker “I learned drinking and love that winter”, which appeared in his book Winterfold (1976). Here, as elsewhere, Brown’s revisions were sound. It is to be regretted, I think, that his present editors sometimes ignore them, as they do in this case. All the same, the fact that he replaced “love” with a hawk cannot go unremarked. It is hard not to become aware of a lack of erotic commitment in Brown’s verse, where there are mothers and sisters and daughters but few lovers. The odd unrelated woman does put in an appearance, but generally turns out to be a mermaid.

Brown defined his own themes as “mainly religious (birth, love, death, resurrection, ceremonies of fishing and agriculture)”, and mentioned Norse sagas, the Bible, and Catholic rituals as the main influences on him. This summary gives an idea of the narrowness of his range, but also of the depth of his seriousness. I like him least where he lets his faith do his thinking for him, and where he goes in for counting things (sheep, angels, herrings, whatever) in the manner of W.H. Davies. In a short poem called “The Twelve Days of Christmas: Tinker Talk”, for instance, he mentions four shepherds, four shadows, three ships, one shepherd, and three skippers, all in the space of 36 lines. The effect of such countings is not so much precise as precious. It is decorative and folksy, a species of latter-day Georgianism, though Brown tried to make it look hard-edged by invoking the sagas and the ballads as authority for it.

Schiller once divided writers into the naive and the sentimentive. By the former he meant those, like John Clare, to whom poetry comes as Keats said it should, as naturally as leaves come to a tree. By the latter he meant those, like Goethe or T.S. Eliot, who are more conscious of the leaves coming, so to speak, and have to work to achieve their growth.

My hesitation about George Mackay Brown is that in him a major talent may have been misled by some need to persuade itself that it was naive when it was really sentimentive. The best poems here are not naive in any sense of the word. They achieve their simplicities, they do not take them for granted. In some of the others a false note is sounded so that I recall Brown’s rival, the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith, once muttering to me about George switching on the electric light and writing with his Biro about the beauties of the oil-lamp and the quill. But there are sufficient good ones to outweigh these, poems rooted in the rocky world of Orkney, its history and mystery, full of the smack of the sea and the shout of the wind. And in these good poems I can still hear George’s actual voice, quiet, cunning and polite to the point of irony, thanking my wife for every counted rasher.

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