The Storm and Other Poems

The legendary poet of the Orkneys – who later became one of Scotland’s most loved C20th poets – George Mackay Brown: this is his first published book of poems, here reissued with a new introduction by Kathleen Jamie and illustrations by Julia Sorrell.

He was encouraged to publish by the great writer and fellow Orcadian, Edwin Muir, who contributed the introduction to the 1955 first edition. Muir described his work as having ‘a magic and a strangeness rare anywhere in literature today’. 

These poems are about an island people — crofter, sailor, tinker, fisherman, saint — and about those things that are done under the magical sun of the north, generation by generation. 

It is a truly remarkable collection which will remind us what an original voice Mackay Brown possessed, and why he went on to become one of the leading Scottish poets of the twentieth century, but with an audience that went far beyond his native land. 

Kathleen Jamie reintroduces the book in a foreword that skillfully points out the connections between The Storm and his later work, and her enthusiasm for his verse will surely be instrumental in leading new readers to this extraordinary poet. 

He left behind him an extraordinary body of work: novels, short stories, poetry, journalism and even two operatic collaborations with Peter Maxwell Davis.

Author

GEORGE MACKAY BROWN was born in Stromness, Orkney, on 17 October 1921. He died there in 1996. His many awards include a Society of Authors Travel Award, 1968; SAC Literature Prize, 1969; Katherine Mansfield Menton Short Story Prize, 1971;  Hon. LLD from Dundee University, 1977; OBE, 1974; James Tait  Black Memorial Prize 1987 (for The Golden Bird). He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel Beside the Ocean of Time.