Twenty-five years after George Mackay Brown’s death, his biographer finds that the great Orcadian poet has become an inextricable part of the way she thinks

On October 14 – “Super Thursday” – publishers flooded the market with more hardback books than on any other day in the calendar: 790 of them last year. As a literary editor, it’s easy to lose patience: too many parcels to open, far too many books to review. And then it’s good to remember that almost every volume represents years of work, that many of them are labours of love, and that, behind the story a book tells, there’s the story of how it came to birth.

My first book, George Mackay Brown: The Life, was published in 2006, but the journey had begun years earlier, in 1992, when my cousin Jock Dalrymple introduced me to the work of a poet I’d never heard of. I was immediately dazzled by George Mackay Brown’s imagery: fresh and spontaneous, yet so natural as to seem almost inevitable. Lovers, at harvest time, lay under the “buttered bannock of the moon”; in April, a lark splurged through “galilees of sky”, and as crofters gathered round their fire in deep December, they felt the wonder and mystery of the Nativity “like the sound a star makes on the longest night”. These images flowed from a poet who almost never used the word “I”, but who was, nonetheless, passionately present in every word he wrote. Brown’s muse Stella Cartwright once described him as writing with “involved detachment”. She put it perfectly.