Allan Massie reflects on the life and work of the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, who saw holiness in the natural world
George Mackay Brown was born in Orkney in 1921 and died there in 1996. Apart from time spent studying at Newbattle Abbey and Edinburgh University, he scarcely left the islands. When the Scottish Arts Council gave him a travel grant, he went only as far as Ireland where he stayed with Seamus Heaney, an early admirer of his poetry.
He endured tuberculosis as a young man, suffered from chronic bronchitis, intermittently from depression, and had spells of near-alcoholism. He was a poet from his youth, and, at least in mid-life, a great one, his work distinguished by that rare combination of simplicity and depth. In his best work you felt he was in tune with eternal verities. He wrote exquisite short stories and a couple of good novels, one of which, Magnus, was made into an opera by Peter Maxwell Davies.
