George Mackay Brown was born in Orkney in 1921 and died there in 1996, a place he rarely left. In the late 1950s he studied under the poet Edwin Muir at Newbattle Abbey, outside Edinburgh, but returned home as soon as he graduated. It was Edwin Muir who introduced his first book of poems. Awarded the Society of Authors' Travelling Fellowship in 1968, he refused to travel further than Ireland, where he stayed with his friend and admirer Seamus Heaney. He visited England for the first time in 1989. When his last novel, Beside the Ocean of Time, was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1994, he refused to travel to London for the dinner in the Guildhall. He had already travelled far in a rich harvesting (a favourite word of Brown's) of poems, stories, novels, essays, plays, books for children, moving easily between verse and prose, generations and centuries. His language is poetic and true and moves swiftly in simple lines and sentences, often in very short paragraphs: "The girl brought them shellfish. They left the empty shells on a stone. They rowed North." It is interesting that one of the most exciting living short story writers, Alistair Macleod, different in temperament and much more sparing than Mackay Brown, likewise moves with the same imaginative ease from present-day Nova Scotia to Colmcille on Iona to the generations that left Skye at the time of the Clearances, as if they were all part of the same eternal day.
The editors of Northern Lights state that by intertwining verse and prose they seek to follow "the example of its great predecessor An Orkney Tapestry." George Mackay Brown began his writing career as a local correspondent for The Orkney Herald in the 1940s. As well as reporting football matches and council meetings he wrote a weekly essay, and 50 years on he was still writing a similar column for the Orcadian. These pieces were very popular, appearing every week almost without a break for 25 years. A great part of Northern Lights is made up of selections from these columns, arranged according to the "turning wheel of the year". They are interesting for the occasional fresh insight and vividness of phrasing and the underlying attractiveness of Mackay Brown's personality; but very few weekly columns can survive this transition, and these pieces are, for the most part, no exception. It is hard to imagine them interesting anyone who hasn't already some knowledge of Mackay Brown's work . Also published for the first time is a diary he kept during a visit to the Shetland Islands in 1988, one of the rare visits abroad. There is a rendering of various Orkney and Shetland legends. What emerges gradually is that the editors are scraping an already well-scraped barrel. George Mackay Brown published an enormous body of work in his lifetime and was a watchful, intelligent critic of his own work. Nearly everything new in Northern Lights he had chosen not to publish and most of the inclusions prove him to have been right.
The one exception, and the saving grace of the volume, is the section entitled "Finished Fragrance," particularly the portraits of his mother and father, Mary Jane Mackay and John Brown, tailor, mimic and postman. The pair met and married when she worked as a waitress and chambermaid in the new Stromness Hotel, and they had six children, five of whom survived. In these moving portraits they are truly honoured, and Mackay Brown's method serves him and them superbly. He makes himself as anonymous as the old ballad makers, allowing the portraits to emerge in their own unfettered light with an artfulness that is all the more effective because it is nowhere visible and consciously simple.
Brought up a Presbyterian, Mackay Brown became a Roman Catholic in 1961. Following the Lark, his last collection of poems, he described as written mainly in praise of the light, adding that he hoped it might also "glorify in a small way the Light behind the light". In the final poem, "A Work for Poets," he sets out both his own epigraph and his idea of the function and place of poetry.
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.
John McGahern is a novelist. John Butler Yeats: Letters to his son W.B.Yeats and others 1869-1922, edited by Joseph Hone, abridged and with an introduction by John McGahern, will be published by Faber and Faber in November