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Northern lights :
a poet's sources / George Mackay Brown ; ed. by Archie Bevan
and Brian Murray. - London : John Murray, 1999. - XII-336 p. :
ill., maps ; 23 cm.
ISBN 0-7195-5949-9
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NOTE DE L'ÉDITEUR : Northern Lights
presents George Mackay Brown's writings on many of the places,
people, legends and seasons that formed his vision and his work.
Throughout the book, poems appear in counter point with prose.
Included here are memoirs of
his father and mother, of friends […] and of passing strangers
like George Bernard Shaw. Pieces are collected on Rackwick, for
instance, or Yesnaby or Birsay, Harray Lock or the Cathedral
of St Magnus. Legends like that of the ship that struck
the moon, the taking of Orkney or the fiddler of Fara are
gathered, and, in a selection from his Orcadian column « Under Brinkie's Brae », the Northern
seasons are celebrated. Though George Mackay Brown so rarely
left his home islands, a fascinating contrast is provided here
by his diary of a visit to the very different Shetland Islands
with Gunnie Moberg and Kulgin Duval.
Many of the pieces collected
in this book are published for the first time. A few were printed
in Orkney and national newspaper but for most they will
be as fresh as the rest. Taken together, they provide
a view, through a unique writer's own eyes, of his sources
and inspiration.
| ❙ | George
Mackay Brown was born in Orkney in 1921 and died there in 1996.
Following his first book in 1954 he published many more, including
plays, novels, and collections of short stories and poems. Sir Peter
Maxwell Davies has set much of his work to music. In 1988 he was
awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize for The Golden
Bird. In 1944 his Beside the Ocean of Time was shortlisted
for the Booker Prize and judged Scottish Book of the Year by the
Saltire Society. |
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EUAN CAMERON :
[…]
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 ».
☐ The Sunday Times, 18th July 1999
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COMPLÉMENT
BIBLIOGRAPHIQUE
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| mise-à-jour : 17 septembre 2006 |
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