Carve the Runes

In this, the first new selection of George Mackay Brown’s poetry for over 25 years, Kathleen Jamie explores the multi-faceted world of the poet’s Orkney, his lifelong home and inspiration. George Mackay Brown’s concerns were the ancestral world, the communalities of work, the fables and religious stories which he saw as underpinning mortal lives. Brown believed from the outset that poets had a social role and his true task was to fulfil that role. Art was sprung from the community, and his role as poet to know that community, to sing its stories.