From my Journal, March 28th, 1998; George Mackay Brown and other poets.

Totnes, Saturday, March 28th, 1998

     Very late last night I finished reading George Mackay Brown’s memoir, For the Islands I Sing.  The book captured me. I completed reading it in one session. It also brought to mind a memory I have of the early 1970s when I lived in Johnshaven, a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland some miles north of Montrose. One summer a young Irish carpenter came to work in the village. We met on a few occasions in the bar of the Ship Hotel which was conveniently situated next to Kirk Cottage where I lived. One evening he told me he had plied his trade on Orkney the previous summer and while there he had become acquainted with the poet, George Mackay Brown and on a number of occasions they had enjoyed a game of chess together over a pint of beer. The young carpenter clearly admired the poet, telling me Mackay Brown was a sincere and modest man, of quietly ironic humour.  

From a painting by Ian MacInnes held at the Orkney Library and  Archive, Kirkwall

     These qualities are evident in the poet’s memoir  but it is in many ways a private if not evasive record. He mentions fellow poets, such as Hugh McDiarmid and Norman McCaig but he gives little away about them. He seems a man who is more rooted to where he comes from, (and there are good reasons for this) than one who engages passionately with others.  His book brings out the timelessness of Orkney and its culture, and the grandeur of its nordic history.  The following poem though not from his memoir epitomises  for me the spirit of this book. 

Beachcomber

by George Mackay Brown

Monday I found a boot –

Rust and salt leather.
I gave it back to the sea, to dance in

Tuesday a spar of timber worth thirty bob.
Next winter
It will be a chair, a coffin, a bed.

Wednesday a half can of Swedish spirits.

I tilted my head.
The shore was cold with mermaids and angels.

Thursday I got nothing, seaweed,
A whale bone,
Wet feet and a loud cough.

Friday I held a seaman’s skull,

Sand spilling from it
The way time is told on kirkyard stones.

Saturday a barrel of sodden oranges.
A Spanish ship
Was wrecked last month at The Kame.

Sunday, for fear of the elders,

I sit on my bum.
What’s heaven? A sea chest with a thousand gold coins. 

     In For the Islands I Sing Mackay Brown also mentions that while he was struggling to become recognised as a poet, (not that he was overpowerfully determined on this), he received advice from Cecil Day Lewis. Reading this directed my thoughts back to the mid-1960s and Trent Park College where I trained to be a teacher. The English born Canadian poet, Patrick Anderson, was the principal lecturer in English Literature at the college. He introduced me and some other students to Cecil Day Lewis and John Heath Stubbs. All three encouraged me in my poetry but I later came to a view that their motives may not have been altruistic and my meagre poetic talents were not their central interest in me. Still, I suppose we should not separate life from poetry or poetry from life.

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Sources

For the Islands I Sing George Mackay Brown (John Murray, 1996)

"The Beachcomber" from Fishermen with Ploughs George Mackay Brown; (Hogarth Press, 1971)