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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.
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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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