Travellers; George Mackay Brown

Travellers is a rich and varied collection which allows the range of poetic diversity of George Mackay Brown to journey to its full expression.

We find all the familiar themes of religion, community, faith and myth allied and interwoven but, like jewelled and beautiful ornaments, they are angled this way and that in order to shed light upon hitherto unexplored facets in poem clusters such as "St Magnus Day 1992," "Saint Magnus Day," and "Saint Magnus Day: The Relics."

The reader journeys through a timeless physical and mental landscape visiting places as diverse as Earl Rognvald's Jerusalem, Edinburgh Castle, Australia, and Pluscarden Abbey.

There are clusters of poems about festivals, midwinter and midsummer, which hark back to the great Celtic tradition of poets such as Duncan Ban Macintyre and his great praise poem "Moladh Beinn Dobhrainn/In Praise of Ben Doran" in which the power and acuity of the expressed observation is the distillation of many yearly cycles and thus acquires a timeless, otherworldly quality.

The dimension of timelessness is always a feature of GMB's work. The paradox is in the passing of chronological time and of the never-ending circle of existence - the end is always in the beginning so, although destruction is a possibility so too is renewal, and its symbols in GMB's work are the journey and the seedcorn. These motifs lace together the poems in this collection. For GMB, the world is reborn through ritual, and the innocence of island life is enriched by myth. His gift of imagery is seductive and the visionary nature of his poetry makes the reader ask fundamental questions about human existence.

Like Neil Gunn, GMB inhabits two worlds at once - the everyday world and the world of the underlying myth - and undertakes a permanent timeless poetic journey towards an ultimate truth. It is sometimes easy to forget that GMB was heir to a Celtic tradition as well as a Nordic one. This collection reminds us very strongly of the importance of this heritage to him in poems such as "Mhari," written to his dead Highland mother.

It is not only content and influence which is varied, style is, too. There is a wide selection ranging from narrative verse involving Norse imagery and skaldic kennings to chinoiseries and haikus - a testing ground for the poet's skill passed through triumphantly in examples like the following, in which the susurration of the sea itself may be heard throughout.

Sea, old sculptor, carves from the western ramparts
Stack and cave and skerry,
Sweep harpist, with sagas of salt and stone.
("Haikus for the Holy Places: Sea and Cliffs")

This collection is a weaving together of motifs, styles and meanings old and new, imbued with a distinctive elegiac quality, albeit one which looks to the future. It is fitting that the last poem in the collection, "Ikey: His Will in Winter Written," concerns that indefatigable traveller, Ikey Faa, and his bequest of the beauties of the islands to those who appreciate them in what appears to be his last will and testament, yet the whole idea of journey's end is subverted by the final lines,

(Will I manage to struggle to the ale-house
before closing time? If I do, will the thin-lipped
prevaricator that keeps the place give me the loan of a
last whisky?)

Brian Murray and Archie Bevan have brought together a celebratory collection which is a distillation of all the elements that made GMB the voice of these islands. Fittingly, that voice pens its own epitaph in a poem about Tolstoy,

Look, the crucible is cold,
Look, the manuscript
Sifts pages across the great oak table,
The sheaves are in the barn.
A book is heavy with jewels and icons.

DH