Travellers: Poems

Travellers offers a new selection of George Mackay Brown's poems collected here for the first time and edited by Archie Bevan and Brian Murray. Many of them were never published in his lifetime.;The large and growing numer of those who love his poems will know that in this book they will find the simplicity and directness that convey not less but more. They know too that George Mackay Brown, seemingly remote in Orkney, nevertheless responded to a vast range of the world's experience. Even so, there are unexpected treats to be found here. As always the seasons of the year and of life yield new and fresh magic in his hands: but it is more of a surprise to encounter Tolstoy, or Modigliani, or refugees from Tibet, or the people of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, or the great uranium controversy that threatened to engulf the islands. Haiku and chinoiseries are departures of a different kind, though it is true that Brown's essential poetical vision does not change, rather that these forms are transmuted and become personal to him.;In these poems readers will find new ideas previously unexplored, but they will also find those qualities that made George Mackay Brown different from anyone else.