George Mackay Brown: The Poet's Year

The Poet's Year

He can make his mouth shine—
Drops from a gray nail of ice

His silences
Are like the first cold root stirrings

His verse a trumpet in March
To widen the sun circles

Children come in a dance to his images:
Daffodil, lamb, lark

He wears the lyric coat
Cut from blue bales of sea and sky

He has knowledge of furrows
Beyond the ploughmen

Can thrift sing, can herring?
He tongues their pink and silver silences

Sweeter than beeplunder, oozing,
The fairground fiddle

He knows the horncall, near sunset
For Hesper and Orion

He goes by stubble fields
Tongue rich with shadows

He graves names of the dead
Deeper than kirkyard stones

What now, midwinter bellmouth?
Christus natus est

—George Mackay Brown, from Travellers

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Happy birthday once again to one of my favorite poets, George Mackay Brown. This poem from 1986 was published posthumously in 2001, in Travellers (London: John Murray).

I love this poem for its haiku-like structure, its brief stanzas that give one or two essential images per stanza. It follows a format that Mackay Brown often used, what he called a calendar poem: one stanza per month, based on observations of the land, the people, the changing of the seasons, the important festivals that mark the turning wheel of the year. Some calendar poems follow individual persons through the year, others are more general, like this one. Some of his calendar poems are among his longest poems, with many sections marked by calendar time.

Here's another poem, from 1985, which speaks to me at this time of year: harvest, the Day of the Dead, the rounding cycle of seasons, the time of year when the walls between the worlds thin and we are close to the passage of time, of our own mortality. This poem also speaks of Orkney, the islands where the poet was rooted, born, lived, died, and is well remembered.

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The Friend

Stone, tree, star, fish, animal, man,
All gathered
Within one circle of light and fire.
And think in Orkney
Of the old friendship of stone and man,
How they honoured and served each other.
The fire on the hearth, blue tremblings
Of water in well and wall-niche,
The stone bed,
The stones that children enchant on the shore
To ship or castle,
Querns that ground corn,
The Book of the Dead—
Stone pages, celebrations in the kirkyard.

More about George Mackay Brown

It should not be obligatory for poets to celebrate, as best they can, only the greyness of contemporary life. Some of the poems in this book are swatches cut from here and there in the one weave of time. —GMB, in his Introduction to Winterfold, 1976

With this comment, GMB announces his ongoing project of writing about Orkney history, the history of Vikings and Earls, tinkers and wandering bards, both ancient and contemporary. Many of his writings are set in the past. Winterfold contains poems told in the voices of long-dead voyagers to the islands, and there is also a sequence about Earl Rognvald, who led a group of Norse crusaders in 1151. In his magnificent novel, Magnus, GMB tells the story of the life and death of the Earl Magnus, who later became St. Magnus of Kirkwall, in Orkney. GMB often moves back and forth in time, with the result that many of his poems become timeless, transcending local concerns to express something universal, endless, and eternal. Part of his appeal to me is this mythic, archetypal character in his writing.

For example, from The Sea: Four Elegies in Winterfold, GMB provides this magnificent sense of the passages at the end of life. This poem has been a favorite of mine for 30 years, and it deals with the passage of death better than almost any other contemporary poetry:

The Door of Water

Think of death, how it has many doors.
A child enters the Dove Door
And leaves a small wonderment behind him.
For soldiers and airmen there is the Door of Fire.
Most of us, with inadequate heart or lung or artery,
Disappear through the simple Door of the Skull.
There is the Door of the Sheaf: the granary is beyond.
The very old enter, stooping,
Harvesters under a load of tranquil sorrows.
For islanders, the Door of Water.
Beyond a lintel carved with beautiful names
The sea yields to the bone, at last, a meaning.

Seamus Heaney once wrote the following about GMB, which I think is very true, and speaks of the elements that combine together to make him an ancient/modern poet: . . . he transforms everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney. His sense of the world an his way with words are powerfully at one with each other. His vision has something of the skaldic poet's consciousness of inevitable ordeal, something of the haiku master's susceptability to the delicate and momentary, and since the beginning of his career he has added uniquely and steadfastly to the riches of poetry in English.

The skald and the haiku master meeting on common ground: I find these elements in my own poetic choices, marked by my Norse and Irish ancestry coupled with my affinity for Asian poetic values, having spent the earliest part of my childhood in Asia. So GMB appeals to me because he encompasses not only deep time but also space across cultures. His poetry is both geologic and aware of the world's events; the suffering and sorrows of life, and the fact that we who suffer can still stop and stare, enraptured by a sky full of clouds, a sea full of life leaping onto the sharp black boulders of the near shore, a simple flower in an empty field.

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Here is another small poem of mine, also given to the memory of George Mackay Brown:

Rose Runes

Inside that rose window
so carefully assembled in the east wall:
a labyrinth of light.

At high morning,
see it etched on the cathedral floor,
a road of blue, red, gold, a flowering field.

At midnight, the rose-trail flickers
with light from a thousand candles, the church
a kindling tinderbox for All Souls’.

A poem for George Mackay Brown

One of my favorite contemporary poets is George Mackay Brown, poet of the Orkney Islands. In his work the Celtic and Norse mingled, and produced a modern bard. His shorter poems are often haiku-like in their observations of the interplay between people and their world—always the islander's world, where a plowman one day will be a fisherman the next.

Many of his poems mark time as the turning cycles of the agricultural or religious years. They are calendar-poems: lists of days, weeks, months, years. Time is always changing things, even as the land endures. Many lists appear in his poems, but they are essential lists: that is, lists of essences. There is nothing superficial or arbitrary about them; nothing listed is something other than what we need to survive.

In some ways, GMB was a poet's poet: someone whose writings are beloved more by those who appreciate great writing than by the average reader. I first discovered his poems almost 30 years ago, and have sought them out ever since, as well as his non-fiction books, novels, and short stories. I have as many of his books as are available in the US, plus some others. I go back to them periodically, to refresh myself with the cold sea winds that move across the islands, and the dark mysteries found at midnight in the circles of standing stones.

This is one of GMB's best-known poems, and the last line sums up what poets do better than almost any other such statement I've ever read:

The Poet

Therefore he no more troubled the pool of silence
But put on mask and cloak,
Strung a guitar
And moved among the folk.
Dancing they cried,
'Ah, how our sober islands
Are gay again, since this blind lyrical tramp
Invaded the Fair.'

Under the last dead lamp
When all the dancers and masks had gone inside
His cold stare
Returned to its true task, the interrogation of silence.

The interrogation of silence. That's why we hear so much of the land, the gulls, the rocks, and time itself, in his poetry. It is not poetry about the poet, but a bard giving the news of the land, the greater world, and those universal forces that will speak through no one else, and whose words are surrounded by vast silences.

Another GMB poem is a different sort of ars poetica:

A Work for Poets 

To have carved on the days of our vanity
A sun
A ship
A star
A cornstalk

Also a few marks
From an ancient forgotten time
A child may read

That not far from the stone
A well
Might open for wayfarers

Here is a work for poets—
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence.

Again we end with silence. One of the things I most identify with in GMB's poetry is his sense of elemental realities that are both inpersonal and transpersonal. The cares and sorrows of human life are readily found throughout his writings—he battled with melancholia his whole life—but they are mythic, they are universal, the universal found and bound within the particular, and they are also more-than-human. Anyone who feels weighed down by poetry's long-running obsession with the confessional lyric can find a bracing, alternative vision of poetry in GMB's words.

Many people have discovered GMB's words through his frequent collaboration with composer Peter Maxwell Davies. That is how I discovered him myself, through a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and guitar, Dark Angels. Numerous recordings of Davies' settings of GMB's texts are available.

So, here is the poem I wrote in tribute to GMB, not long before his death in 1996. It was inspired in part by Maeshowe, a Neolithic cairn in Orkney, which GMB has also written about, among numerous others.

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Burial Mound
(for George Mackay Brown)


The darkness is a hole in the mind,
a place where gravedwellers
carve dark runes in darker stone.

Words filled with the light
glimmer there.

What we take for the journey
is little enough: a flint,
a small lamp, six blades, no map.

These bones
have travelled further
than any living man.

Leave a few words
to the silence,
and go.
Back to the daylight, the fields,
the plow, the ships that plow the waves.
Leave the darkness
to the hot sleep
of dragons.