Carve the Runes: Selected Poems

In this new Selected Poems, Kathleen Jamie explores the multi-faceted world of George Mackay Brown’s Orkney, the poet’s 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. This is not the attitude of a shrinking violet, tentatively exploring his ‘voice’. Art was sprung from the community, and his role as poet to know that community, to sing its stories. But there was also room for introspection; the poet’s task was simultaneously to ‘interrogate silence’.

Reviews of Carve the Runes: Selected Poems

'New editions of his poetry and short stories, published to mark his centenary, show his spirituality and extraordinary gift for 'involved detachment'' * The Spectator * 'Malachy Tallack and Kathleen Jamie do an excellent job in editing these collections for the centenary of MacKay Brown's birth. They choose both poems and stories that show the appeal and strength of his writing' — Donald Murray * Stornoway Gazette *