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''.