Life of the poet and Catholic-convert Mackay Brown steps on sacred ground
THIS book is a treble biography. It’s the story of George Mackay Brown, Scottish poet and Catholic convert; it’s the story of Ron Ferguson’s response to the theological affront of GMB’s change-of-faith tradition, and it’s the cultural biography of that wonderful landscape, the Orkney islands.
Orkney, windswept, hermetic and isolated, gave birth to the impoverished and tubercular Mackay Brown. It was the Orkney landscape and heroic story tradition that fed GMB’s imagination. At a time when the great Hugh MacDiarmid was proclaiming the primacy of the Communist Party central committee, the poet Mackay Brown was rediscovering a Catholic god in his desolate Kirkwall TB ward. Mackay Brown would disregard the insight that materialism promises us something hardly distinguishable from eternal life. The abiding signature of his work, in poetry and prose, is that distinctive mark made by the Mater Ecclesiae in Rome.
