0:00:03 > 0:00:06In this series, I've been lucky enough to travel around Britain,
0:00:06 > 0:00:10visiting the places that inspired some of my favourite landscape poems.
0:00:10 > 0:00:14I suppose all poets write about their environment to an extent,
0:00:14 > 0:00:17but I'm on the trail of poets who've formed an especially intense
0:00:17 > 0:00:21and rewarding relationships with particular corners of the country.
0:00:21 > 0:00:26This programme focuses on a great Scottish poet, George Mackay Brown.
0:00:26 > 0:00:31It's hard to think of a 20th century poet more intimately connected
0:00:31 > 0:00:34with a specific place than George Mackay Brown is with Orkney.
0:00:34 > 0:00:39The past and the present of Orkney is unchallenged subject
0:00:39 > 0:00:41of George Mackay Brown's writing.
0:00:41 > 0:00:43Over novels, short stories and poetry,
0:00:43 > 0:00:46he perfected his brilliant and original vision
0:00:46 > 0:00:50of this place, where the rhythms of land and sea wove
0:00:50 > 0:00:53a pattern and harmony through his imagination.
0:00:55 > 0:00:59"There are places that speak Telling the stories of us and them
0:00:59 > 0:01:03"A village asleep, loaded with dream
0:01:03 > 0:01:07"An ocean flicking its pages over the sand
0:01:07 > 0:01:09"Eventually we reply
0:01:09 > 0:01:13"A conversation of place and page over time
0:01:13 > 0:01:18"Inscribing the map, so that each in turn might hold the line"
0:01:27 > 0:01:31Ever since I first read a poem called Hamnavoe by George Mackay Brown,
0:01:31 > 0:01:36I wanted to make this journey up to Orkney, where that poem is set.
0:01:37 > 0:01:41George Mackay Brown was one of the greatest Scottish poets of the 20th century.
0:01:41 > 0:01:46But unlike many writers of the period, he never belonged to a clique, a club or a style.
0:01:46 > 0:01:47He was an outsider,
0:01:47 > 0:01:50who lived in one of the most remote corners of Britain.
0:01:50 > 0:01:53I'm intrigued to find out how that place
0:01:53 > 0:01:57made George the great poet he would become.
0:01:58 > 0:02:01Orkney is a short ferry ride off the far northern tip of Scotland,
0:02:01 > 0:02:03but it seems a lot further.
0:02:03 > 0:02:07The distinctive huddle of low green islands, the high mountains
0:02:07 > 0:02:09and the astonishing colours of light,
0:02:09 > 0:02:12immediately places you in a new world.
0:02:13 > 0:02:18For George, the island of Orkney was his identity, his home and his subject.
0:02:18 > 0:02:20He wrote prolifically about this place,
0:02:20 > 0:02:23and maybe never better than in the poem Hamnavoe.
0:02:25 > 0:02:29Hamnavoe is the old Norse name for Stromness,
0:02:29 > 0:02:32the small town where George lived and died.
0:02:32 > 0:02:35The poem is a celebration of that town,
0:02:35 > 0:02:38woven with a poignant, personal memory.
0:02:38 > 0:02:40A memory of his father.
0:02:57 > 0:02:59Those opening lines from Hamnavoe
0:02:59 > 0:03:02are unmistakably George Mackay Brown.
0:03:02 > 0:03:05Full of compact, jewel-like, brilliant images.
0:03:06 > 0:03:09He is what I would call a "between-the-eyes" poet.
0:03:09 > 0:03:15It just hits you. It's so concise, so beautifully spare.
0:03:15 > 0:03:18It's a great place to start if you haven't read poetry,
0:03:18 > 0:03:21because you'll get it. And it won't make you feel stupid.
0:03:21 > 0:03:25And one of the reasons is because it actually trusts your intelligence.
0:03:25 > 0:03:29I've come here to find out the story behind Hamnavoe.
0:03:29 > 0:03:31How did this poem make it onto the page?
0:03:31 > 0:03:35And how did George Mackay Brown, a largely uneducated boy
0:03:35 > 0:03:37from a poor island family,
0:03:37 > 0:03:40make the journey to become a poet in the first place?
0:03:40 > 0:03:43I began by visiting his boyhood home.
0:03:43 > 0:03:48It was in this house in the heart of Stromness that George was born,
0:03:48 > 0:03:52the youngest of John and Mary Brown's five children.
0:03:52 > 0:03:56One of George's earliest and vivid memories of his early times in this house,
0:03:56 > 0:03:59is of being told stories by his older sister, Ruby,
0:03:59 > 0:04:03as they sat on the rug in front of the fire.
0:04:03 > 0:04:07I was amazed to learn that he wrote his first full poem at the age of eight.
0:04:07 > 0:04:09Unfortunately, no copies have survived of that poem,
0:04:09 > 0:04:11but we do know what it was about:
0:04:11 > 0:04:15the same subject that would continue to draw George's gaze
0:04:15 > 0:04:17for the rest of his life.
0:04:17 > 0:04:22I remember sitting in a field, one Saturday, I think it must have been,
0:04:22 > 0:04:25I wrote a poem about Stromness.
0:04:25 > 0:04:29I took it home and showed my mother and father.
0:04:29 > 0:04:32And they thought it was wonderful.
0:04:32 > 0:04:34I think it must have been pretty awful, of course!
0:04:36 > 0:04:41I've always thought the scenes and views in early childhood are incredibly influential
0:04:41 > 0:04:43and I'm sure this was the case for George.
0:04:43 > 0:04:47This was the view he would have seen out of his very first house,
0:04:47 > 0:04:51where the close opens up to this wonderful fishermen's pier.
0:04:51 > 0:04:56And it's a view that really contains all of the most important elements of George's writing.
0:04:56 > 0:05:01The farmers' fields, the lobster creels, the sea, the hills,
0:05:01 > 0:05:04these houses clustered around the edge.
0:05:04 > 0:05:06This really was the visual world
0:05:06 > 0:05:10that George would go on to draw all of his poetry and his writing from.
0:05:13 > 0:05:18I began to write again when I was in my mid-teens.
0:05:18 > 0:05:21But they were very morbid sort of poems.
0:05:21 > 0:05:24Melodramatic deaths and all that sort of thing.
0:05:26 > 0:05:27But I was at the age, I think,
0:05:27 > 0:05:32you know, where a kind of darkness comes in the mind,
0:05:32 > 0:05:35but only temporary, thank goodness.
0:05:37 > 0:05:40In 1940, at the age of 18, George left school
0:05:40 > 0:05:45with the minimum of qualifications, and even less in the way of motivation.
0:05:45 > 0:05:47He seemed lethargic and depressed,
0:05:47 > 0:05:50and ended up following his father into the postal service.
0:05:50 > 0:05:52Not as a postman, but sorting mail.
0:05:52 > 0:05:56Although George was still working away at odd poems,
0:05:56 > 0:06:00the chance he might have a literary career was unthinkable.
0:06:00 > 0:06:03John Brown had always urged his children to try to
0:06:03 > 0:06:06get themselves out of the rut, to make something of themselves.
0:06:06 > 0:06:10Btu at this point, George seemed to have little sense of what to do with himself.
0:06:10 > 0:06:14It was at this time that a bleak sequence of events
0:06:14 > 0:06:16began to make that decision for him.
0:06:21 > 0:06:23While George was sorting mail,
0:06:23 > 0:06:26life in the outside world was rapidly changing.
0:06:26 > 0:06:30When the British fleet anchored in Orkney at the start of World War II,
0:06:30 > 0:06:34these remote islands suddenly found themselves at the heart of the action.
0:06:34 > 0:06:3760,000 soldiers poured in
0:06:37 > 0:06:40to protect the strategically important naval base of Scapa Flow.
0:06:40 > 0:06:43The population mushroomed, and within a matter of months
0:06:43 > 0:06:47there were three servicemen in the Orkneys to every one islander.
0:06:49 > 0:06:53During these war years, George's own world was blown apart.
0:06:53 > 0:06:57When he was called up, his army medical revealed he couldn't fight
0:06:57 > 0:06:59because he had TB.
0:06:59 > 0:07:02On top of this, the fear of infecting his colleagues at the sorting office
0:07:02 > 0:07:05meant he lost his job and was confined to his sick bed.
0:07:05 > 0:07:07His family were warned
0:07:07 > 0:07:12that he would never be strong enough to lead a normal life.
0:07:12 > 0:07:15Everybody knew that George had had a troubled time.
0:07:15 > 0:07:19He had wanted to go and fight, but he was unfit.
0:07:19 > 0:07:24All the rest of the people in his class at school had gone to fight,
0:07:24 > 0:07:27and he was left at home. What do you do?
0:07:29 > 0:07:33Someone who helped George answer this question was an army officer
0:07:33 > 0:07:35billeted in the Brown household.
0:07:35 > 0:07:37His name was Francis Scarfe,
0:07:37 > 0:07:40an established poet and university lecturer
0:07:40 > 0:07:44who introduced the convalescing George to a whole raft of writers,
0:07:44 > 0:07:46including D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas,
0:07:46 > 0:07:50as well as the music of Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
0:07:50 > 0:07:52More than this though,
0:07:52 > 0:07:56he encouraged the awkward adolescent to develop his own poetic voice.
0:07:56 > 0:08:00For a brief period, George poured his energies into writing.
0:08:02 > 0:08:08But undoubtedly the greatest impact on George's life during the war years was his father's death.
0:08:08 > 0:08:12The war effort involved the whole of the Orkney community.
0:08:12 > 0:08:16George's father had the gruelling job of spending freezing cold nights
0:08:16 > 0:08:20tending the isolated lookout huts that lined Scapa Flow.
0:08:20 > 0:08:23It was while he was on duty, in July 1940,
0:08:23 > 0:08:27that the 65-year-old John Brown died suddenly of a heart attack.
0:08:29 > 0:08:33It must have been a dark time for George, trying to come to terms
0:08:33 > 0:08:38with his father's death, and finding himself too ill to ever work.
0:08:38 > 0:08:43He was stuck in the rut that his father had always hoped his children would avoid.
0:08:43 > 0:08:46It was seven years before George, by then aged 25,
0:08:46 > 0:08:49felt able to write about his father
0:08:49 > 0:08:52in the poem that eventually became Hamnavoe.
0:08:52 > 0:08:55Hamnavoe is a vividly visual poem that evokes the life
0:08:55 > 0:08:59and the spirit of a small Orkney community.
0:08:59 > 0:09:01In the poem, the town unfolds for us
0:09:01 > 0:09:05as a postman makes his rounds through the streets.
0:09:05 > 0:09:09That postman is John Brown, the poet's father.
0:09:09 > 0:09:12And Hamnavoe, whilst being a poem of tribute to a place,
0:09:12 > 0:09:16is also an elegiac hymn to John Brown.
0:09:16 > 0:09:21A poetic letter written by a son to his father.
0:09:21 > 0:09:25"My father passed with his penny letters
0:09:25 > 0:09:28"Through closes opening & shutting like legends
0:09:28 > 0:09:31"When barbarous with gulls Hamnavoe's morning broke
0:09:31 > 0:09:34"On the salt & tar steps.
0:09:34 > 0:09:37"Herring boats, puffing red sails,
0:09:37 > 0:09:39"the tillers of cold horizons,
0:09:39 > 0:09:42"leaned down the gull-gaunt tide
0:09:42 > 0:09:46"And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
0:09:46 > 0:09:49"A stallion at the sweet fountain dredged water
0:09:49 > 0:09:53"and touched fire from steel-kissed cobbles.
0:09:53 > 0:09:56"Hard on noon four bearded merchants
0:09:56 > 0:09:59"Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled.
0:09:59 > 0:10:04"Holy with greed, chanting their slow grave jargon.
0:10:04 > 0:10:09"A tinker keened like a tartan gull at cuithe-hung doors.
0:10:09 > 0:10:12"A crofter lass trudged through the lavish dung
0:10:12 > 0:10:14"In a dream of cornstalks and milk.
0:10:14 > 0:10:17"Blessings and soup plates circled.
0:10:17 > 0:10:22"Euclidian light ruled the town in segments blue and grey.
0:10:22 > 0:10:26"The school bell yawned and lisped down ignorant closes.
0:10:26 > 0:10:31"In 'The Arctic Whaler' three blue elbows fell
0:10:31 > 0:10:35"Regular as waves from beards spumy with porter.
0:10:35 > 0:10:39"Till the amber day ebbed out to its black dregs."
0:10:42 > 0:10:47In that fantastic first half of Hamnavoe, even though it's set in a long-gone era,
0:10:47 > 0:10:51for me, the townsfolk, not just
0:10:51 > 0:10:58John Brown the postman, but the fishermen, the merchants, seem to be hotwired into life in every line.
0:10:58 > 0:11:02One that I love especially, he's describing the men drinking at the bar.
0:11:02 > 0:11:09He talks about how, "Three blue elbows fell, regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,"
0:11:09 > 0:11:11which is this stuff.
0:11:11 > 0:11:15And I love that idea of these elbows rising and falling,
0:11:15 > 0:11:17a bit like the waves outside.
0:11:20 > 0:11:23As the postman, John Brown was a popular figure in Stromness,
0:11:23 > 0:11:27and his son, too, became a well-known character about the town.
0:11:27 > 0:11:33Everyone still talks about George as a friend, and his spirit seems tangible in the place.
0:11:33 > 0:11:37Everybody's life is conditioned,
0:11:37 > 0:11:39to a great extent, by the place that they live in.
0:11:39 > 0:11:42Stromness is quite a... Well, it's...
0:11:44 > 0:11:48..a beautiful place to live in, I think. It's a sort of microcosm of
0:11:48 > 0:11:50the whole of life
0:11:50 > 0:11:53in quite a small area.
0:11:53 > 0:11:56You can see things whole and complete from any point of view.
0:11:58 > 0:12:01I don't know whether there's any other place on earth quite like it.
0:12:04 > 0:12:08How important do you think the physical geography of the Orkney Isles and Stromness
0:12:08 > 0:12:12was to the voice and the style that George developed?
0:12:12 > 0:12:17Over the years, George has become the Orkney poet.
0:12:17 > 0:12:21He has become the person who has portrayed Orkney.
0:12:21 > 0:12:25Ironically, he hardly visited any of Orkney.
0:12:25 > 0:12:31He lived in Stromness, but apart from that, he didn't even go into Kirkwall very often.
0:12:31 > 0:12:36But his knowledge of historic Orkney was considerable.
0:12:36 > 0:12:41He got his first book of the sagas in the local library, and he didn't return it.
0:12:42 > 0:12:46The sagas are the ancient tales of Orkney's Viking past.
0:12:47 > 0:12:52To try and get a sense of the influence these sagas had on George, I wanted to visit the same
0:12:52 > 0:12:57Viking landmark that first fuelled his interest in Orkney's ancient heritage.
0:12:59 > 0:13:06In the summer of 1941, while George was recovering in a sanatorium, he made several walks into Kirkwall.
0:13:06 > 0:13:11On one of those visits he stepped inside this place, St Magnus Cathedral,
0:13:11 > 0:13:15at that point the largest building he'd ever been inside in his life.
0:13:15 > 0:13:20He was immediately impressed and moved by this inherently
0:13:20 > 0:13:24native church, not just aesthetically, by its structure,
0:13:24 > 0:13:31but also intellectually, by the history that this building held literally within its stones.
0:13:31 > 0:13:37In the early 11th century, the Earldom of Orkney was shared between two cousins, Magnus and Haakon.
0:13:37 > 0:13:40When the two cousins feuded, they met at a peace conference
0:13:40 > 0:13:43at which Haakon treacherously ordered the murder of Magnus.
0:13:45 > 0:13:50Magnus went to his death willingly, apparently as happy as a man on his way
0:13:50 > 0:13:58to a feast, choosing to martyr himself for his cousin's soul and for the peace of the Orkney Islands.
0:13:58 > 0:14:01His bones are immured in this pillar.
0:14:04 > 0:14:10The cathedral represented to George a physical link to Orkney's past, while the Orkney sagas
0:14:10 > 0:14:15gave him the key to unlock the simple yet arresting narratives of his island's heritage.
0:14:18 > 0:14:20"Bow your blank head
0:14:20 > 0:14:23"Offer your innocent vein
0:14:23 > 0:14:25"A red wave broke
0:14:25 > 0:14:28"The bell sang in the tower
0:14:28 > 0:14:34"Hands from the plough carried the broken saint under the arch
0:14:34 > 0:14:36"Below the praying sea
0:14:36 > 0:14:38"Knelt on the stones."
0:14:41 > 0:14:44The Orkney sagas, though, were not just influential upon George's
0:14:44 > 0:14:47subject matter, but also upon his style.
0:14:47 > 0:14:51It was from the sagas, it seems, that he harvested so many of
0:14:51 > 0:14:57the crucial elements in the flavours and the tones of his own writing.
0:14:57 > 0:15:01What would you say are the elements of George's poetry that are the most
0:15:01 > 0:15:05impressive, the most uniquely George Mackay Brown, I suppose?
0:15:05 > 0:15:10I would say the most important thing about George's poetry is compression.
0:15:10 > 0:15:17What George learned is the value of getting rid of words and getting down to simplicity.
0:15:17 > 0:15:19That was because of reading the sagas.
0:15:19 > 0:15:22In fact, he says that in a letter to my dad.
0:15:22 > 0:15:27He says, "It's going to be clean and crisp, and I'm going to get rid of anything that's not needed."
0:15:27 > 0:15:31That is when his poetry took off.
0:15:32 > 0:15:38It's absolutely this crispness and clarity, this pared-down style, that makes Hamnavoe so impressive.
0:15:38 > 0:15:42"The boats drove furrows homeward,
0:15:42 > 0:15:45"like ploughmen in blizzards of gulls
0:15:45 > 0:15:46"Gaelic fishergirls
0:15:46 > 0:15:49"flashed knife and dirge over drifts of herring,
0:15:49 > 0:15:52"And boys with penny wands lured gleams
0:15:52 > 0:15:55"From the tangled veins of the flood.
0:15:55 > 0:15:58"Houses went blind up one steep close,
0:15:58 > 0:16:01"for a grief by the shrouded nets.
0:16:01 > 0:16:04"The kirk, in a gale of psalms,
0:16:04 > 0:16:08"went heaving through a tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven.
0:16:08 > 0:16:10"And lovers unblessed by steeples,
0:16:10 > 0:16:13"lay under the buttered bannock of the moon.
0:16:13 > 0:16:18"He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
0:16:18 > 0:16:21"Because of his gay poverty that kept
0:16:21 > 0:16:25"My seapink innocence from the worm and black wind;
0:16:25 > 0:16:27"And because, under equality's sun,
0:16:27 > 0:16:31"All things wear now to a common soiling,
0:16:31 > 0:16:36"in the fire of images gladly I put my hand
0:16:36 > 0:16:39"To save that day for him."
0:16:43 > 0:16:47The award-winning poet Don Paterson is an admirer of this poem,
0:16:47 > 0:16:51and a fan of George Mackay Brown and his lean style.
0:16:51 > 0:16:53What he was doing was incredibly sophisticated.
0:16:53 > 0:16:55That's something that's accurate.
0:16:55 > 0:16:59He started to listen to why things were working.
0:16:59 > 0:17:01It's very strange what he's doing.
0:17:01 > 0:17:04He has a very distinctive music.
0:17:04 > 0:17:08It's all about keeping the vowel sounds big and different.
0:17:08 > 0:17:10It reminds me of Orkney.
0:17:10 > 0:17:13It's almost like things start in their own discreet space
0:17:13 > 0:17:16in relation to one another, because they all sound so different.
0:17:16 > 0:17:20It reminds you of that open, treeless, windswept landscape somehow.
0:17:20 > 0:17:24These standing stones and stuff. Maybe that's just a romantic projection.
0:17:24 > 0:17:29But it's hard not to hear the wind whistling through the words somehow when you read George.
0:17:29 > 0:17:32He's the kind of poet that, when I read his work, he makes you
0:17:32 > 0:17:36want to go back to your own work and be so much harder with it.
0:17:36 > 0:17:38That's exactly right. If nothing else...
0:17:38 > 0:17:43It's not like you're trying to imitate the rhetoric or the style, but it's just that you want
0:17:43 > 0:17:47that economy for your own work, you want it as lean and as powerful.
0:17:47 > 0:17:50I think the rule is "Cut, cut, cut".
0:17:52 > 0:17:58Hamnavoe is a deeply nostalgic poem, a yearning for an Orkney before the invasion of the modern world.
0:17:58 > 0:18:02This nostalgia, which touches much of George's poetry, apparently
0:18:02 > 0:18:07grew out of a journey he made to the nearby island of Hoy just after the war.
0:18:10 > 0:18:15I knew that Hoy was enormously important for George and his poetry, but I was amazed to discover George
0:18:15 > 0:18:19was 25 before he took the short boat trip across the bay
0:18:19 > 0:18:22to visit the island and its hidden valley of Rackwick.
0:18:24 > 0:18:28When George came here, he said that the beauty of Rackwick struck him
0:18:28 > 0:18:31like a blow, and you can really understand what he means.
0:18:31 > 0:18:35It's a landscape of rare and quite astounding grandeur.
0:18:35 > 0:18:40This green valley was a crucial physical place of escape for George.
0:18:40 > 0:18:44He would come here in the summer when it was warm and
0:18:44 > 0:18:48sit around the peat fires and tell stories and drink with his friends.
0:18:52 > 0:18:55"Let no tongue idly whisper here
0:18:55 > 0:19:00"Between those strong red cliffs, Under that great mild sky
0:19:00 > 0:19:05"Lies Orkney's last enchantment, The hidden valley of light
0:19:05 > 0:19:10"Sweetness from the clouds pouring Songs from the surging sea
0:19:10 > 0:19:15"Fenceless fields, Fishermen with ploughs and old heroes
0:19:15 > 0:19:19"Endlessly sleeping in Rackwick's compassionate hills."
0:19:23 > 0:19:28But to George, Rackwick also seemed to be a melancholy place.
0:19:28 > 0:19:34The derelict croft houses, the slow fires of rust devouring the ploughs, and all the remnants of Rackwick's
0:19:34 > 0:19:38once-populous past were stark evidence for George
0:19:38 > 0:19:42of how the rigours of progress could leave a community to die.
0:19:45 > 0:19:50George had a very idealised picture of communities in one sense.
0:19:50 > 0:19:57When he went to Rackwick, what he discovered was a dying community that he wanted to mineralise.
0:19:57 > 0:20:01In a poem to my father, he called it Orkney's last enchantment.
0:20:01 > 0:20:07He saw it as the last gasp of fishermen, crofters, working together
0:20:07 > 0:20:14in a simple kind of way, without the mechanism of capitalism and all of that.
0:20:14 > 0:20:19George's expeditions to Rackwick presented him with a new perspective on his own community
0:20:19 > 0:20:25back in Stromness, and a sense of the role he could play in preserving its past.
0:20:25 > 0:20:29As George later wrote, "I see my task as the poet and storyteller
0:20:29 > 0:20:34"to rescue the century's treasure before it is too late.
0:20:34 > 0:20:38"It is as though the past is a great ship that has gone ashore,
0:20:38 > 0:20:45"and archivist and writer must gather as much of the rich, squandered cargo as they can."
0:20:49 > 0:20:52Through the late 1940s, George began to find his voice as a poet,
0:20:52 > 0:20:56and in 1947 he wrote his first draft of Hamnavoe.
0:20:56 > 0:21:00But George was both personally and artistically a late developer.
0:21:00 > 0:21:04Although he was always writing something, it's fair to say
0:21:04 > 0:21:07he spent much of his 20s staring into the bottom of a beer glass.
0:21:09 > 0:21:12George's poetry may never have left Orkney
0:21:12 > 0:21:18had it not been for a fortuitous meeting in the summer of 1950, by which time George was nearly 30.
0:21:21 > 0:21:23The significance of this bar
0:21:23 > 0:21:29is that it's in the Stromness Hotel, which is where George got to meet one of his great heroes of poetry,
0:21:29 > 0:21:33the wonderful Scottish poet, who was also an Orkney man, Edwin Muir.
0:21:33 > 0:21:39He found Edwin Muir to be a warm and gentle and incredibly... quietly intelligent man,
0:21:39 > 0:21:44who encouraged George to come to the college where he was warden,
0:21:44 > 0:21:47a college called Newbattle, just outside of Edinburgh.
0:21:47 > 0:21:50George eagerly took up Muir's invitation, and his time
0:21:50 > 0:21:53at Newbattle was vital in helping him to mature as a poet,
0:21:53 > 0:21:57by introducing him to a world beyond Orkney.
0:21:57 > 0:22:03And, really, this marks not just the beginning of a new chapter in George's life, but,
0:22:03 > 0:22:09for me, the most important chapter in his writing life, in that those years that he spent in that college
0:22:09 > 0:22:13would inform and influence his poetry for the rest of his life.
0:22:13 > 0:22:18From Newbattle, George went on to Edinburgh University.
0:22:18 > 0:22:22In the pubs of Rose Street, he met some of the leading literary figures
0:22:22 > 0:22:26of Scottish poetry at that time, and grew to be respected as a contemporary.
0:22:30 > 0:22:34But George was always an island man, and soon returned home to Orkney.
0:22:34 > 0:22:38The friends he'd made on the mainland, though, were still looking out for him.
0:22:38 > 0:22:43In fact, it was Edwin Muir who smoothed the path for me.
0:22:43 > 0:22:46I would never have dared to send
0:22:46 > 0:22:48a bunch of poems to any publisher.
0:22:48 > 0:22:52I got a letter from the Hogarth Press, which was a marvellous
0:22:52 > 0:22:56surprise for me, because I didn't even know they had been submitted!
0:22:58 > 0:23:02By 1959, at the age of 38, George's literary career was finally under way,
0:23:02 > 0:23:08spearheaded by Hamnavoe and the other remarkable poems published in Loaves And Fishes.
0:23:08 > 0:23:13George went on to become one of the most prolifically-published poets.
0:23:13 > 0:23:1923 books of poetry, six novels, as well as journalism, short stories and plays.
0:23:19 > 0:23:22He received a host of awards and honours for his unique writing,
0:23:22 > 0:23:25and was even nominated for the Booker Prize.
0:23:25 > 0:23:27His work was perhaps less widely read than
0:23:27 > 0:23:31it might have been, though, owing to George's reclusive nature.
0:23:31 > 0:23:34He only ever made two journeys out of Scotland in his lifetime.
0:23:37 > 0:23:40What would you say George Mackay Brown's influence has been upon
0:23:40 > 0:23:45- the poetry that has been written since, in Scotland and in Britain? - It's hard to quantify.
0:23:45 > 0:23:51I just think it sometimes takes the quieter voices a long time to be heard clearly.
0:23:51 > 0:23:54It's really only in the last... maybe 15, 20 years that we've
0:23:54 > 0:23:57really started to hear his influence come through.
0:23:57 > 0:24:00Maybe largely by the poets of my generation.
0:24:00 > 0:24:05George has become a touchstone point in terms of how you deal with the image,
0:24:05 > 0:24:08how you talk about nature in a way that doesn't seem to appropriate it,
0:24:08 > 0:24:13and how you tune your ear. He has become a real touchstone point.
0:24:15 > 0:24:18A lot of people write about St Kilda, which is the outermost
0:24:18 > 0:24:21of the Outer Hebrides, but no-one much writes about Luing,
0:24:21 > 0:24:27which is one of the innermost of the Inner Hebrides, because it's so easy to get to.
0:24:27 > 0:24:29But it's an even stranger place.
0:24:29 > 0:24:31"Luing
0:24:33 > 0:24:35"When the day comes, as the day surely must,
0:24:35 > 0:24:37"When it is asked of you
0:24:37 > 0:24:40"and you refuse to take that lover's wound again,
0:24:40 > 0:24:43"that cup of emptiness that is our one completion,
0:24:43 > 0:24:47"I'd say go here maybe, to our unsung innermost isle:
0:24:47 > 0:24:53"Kilda's antithesis, yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
0:24:53 > 0:24:56"its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.
0:24:56 > 0:25:00"Leaving the motherland by a two car raft, the littlest of the fleet,
0:25:00 > 0:25:04"you cross the minch to find yourself, if anything,
0:25:04 > 0:25:07"now deeper in her arms than ever, sharing her breath.
0:25:07 > 0:25:12"Watching the red vans sliding silently between her hills.
0:25:12 > 0:25:17"In such intimate exile, who'd believe the burn behind the house
0:25:17 > 0:25:20"the straitened ocean written on the map?
0:25:20 > 0:25:25"Here, beside the fordable Atlantic, reborn into a secret candidacy,
0:25:25 > 0:25:29"the fontanelles reopen one by one in the palms
0:25:29 > 0:25:31"then the breastbone and the brow
0:25:31 > 0:25:37"Aching at the shearwater's wail, the rowan that falls beyond all seasons.
0:25:37 > 0:25:40"One morning you hover on the threshold,
0:25:40 > 0:25:46"knowing for certain the first touch of the light will finish you."
0:25:49 > 0:25:53Pamela Beasant was a friend of George's during the last years of his life.
0:25:53 > 0:25:59Nobody will ever write about Stromness or maybe even think about Stromness in the way he did.
0:25:59 > 0:26:05It's odd, but when he died, it was like a physical absence,
0:26:05 > 0:26:09there was a hole in the town, it was very noticeable.
0:26:09 > 0:26:14Even now, it's still noticeable when you walk past his house and look up.
0:26:14 > 0:26:17He often had daffodils at the window.
0:26:17 > 0:26:20And his absence is almost palpable,
0:26:20 > 0:26:27and I found that, for quite a long time after he died, somehow or other
0:26:27 > 0:26:31Stromness had shed a skin in some way, and was just Stromness again.
0:26:31 > 0:26:36George died in 1996 in the same town that he was born.
0:26:36 > 0:26:41Stromness gave so much to George, the subject matter for his writing
0:26:41 > 0:26:43and a community which nurtured him as a poet.
0:26:43 > 0:26:48In return, he's left Stromness with an extraordinary body of work
0:26:48 > 0:26:53which captures and preserves the character of his town, his Hamnavoe.
0:26:56 > 0:27:01For schoolchildren, it's now the poem they always have to do.
0:27:01 > 0:27:06It becomes the one, "Oh, no, another George poem, good grief!"
0:27:06 > 0:27:13But in the long term it's given Stromness a kind of history that it didn't ever think it would have.
0:27:13 > 0:27:18Stromness never expected to be a place where people from all over
0:27:18 > 0:27:23the world were coming to see the kind of imagery George was talking about.
0:27:23 > 0:27:29What George did for the community was make it feel more aware of the specialness of things.
0:27:31 > 0:27:35After a few days here, you realise what a great poetic guidebook Hamnavoe is to this town.
0:27:35 > 0:27:39It conjures up the history, the land, the skies, the people,
0:27:39 > 0:27:42and in a very subtle way it conjures up George, too.
0:27:45 > 0:27:49My favourite image in the whole poem, though, comes right at the end.
0:27:49 > 0:27:52"In the fire of images gladly I put my hand
0:27:52 > 0:27:54"To save that day for him."
0:27:56 > 0:28:00In writing this poem, George is saving that day for his father,
0:28:00 > 0:28:03but he's also trying to save that day for himself,
0:28:03 > 0:28:10by capturing the spirit of this town, through which John Brown walked every day on his rounds.
0:28:10 > 0:28:15Most importantly, though, I think this is why the poem has such power.
0:28:15 > 0:28:22In those last lines, George Mackay Brown is voicing a shared wish of every grown-up child towards every
0:28:22 > 0:28:29parent, to freeze-frame them in the landscape in which they are most alive to us, wherever that may be.
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