George Mackay Brown

It's 20 years today since George Mackay Brown died – there's some interesting stuff on him here. He's one of those poets I go back to a lot, perhaps because he's really not a lot like anyone else at all.

Poetry sales boost

Just came across this piece while web browsing. I had my misgivings about various parts of the BBC Poetry Season, but it's good to see that it's had some effect.

Interesting, though, that the big sales boosts mentioned there all refer to dead poets - one of my slight gripes about the season might have been that there was relatively little on living, active poets. Still, if it means more people are reading George Mackay Brown, I'm all for it.

A Poet's Guide To Britain

I still haven't watched the Sylvia Plath programme on iPlayer, but I caught the repeat of this week's programme, about George Mackay Brown, on Thursday night, and enjoyed it. He's a poet I like a lot, although I've not read nearly enough of his work.

One thing I'd have liked to heard more about was how much his poetry owed to Old Norse. It's there in the compressed, pared-down nature of his writing, as they suggested, but his style also features, I think, his own version of kennings. Again, half an hour wasn't really enough to do the poet justice.