peony moon

i'm happy to say that myself and marion appear in peony moon this week. i've been reading the letters of william maxwell and frank o'connor recently and, i'm sure it's in there, it recounts how if one were to go round to see maxwell for an interview it was pointless taking a dictaphone as it was his habit to type the answers to questions. i like that description and it puts me in mind of this 'interview'. it's nice to be able to sit back and consider for a time, almost like writing a letter and certainly more time friendly than twitter, facebook or any of those other forms that i don't entertain! it was something of a pleasure to do.

in the doing tho i discovered that maxwell lived just around the corner from me when i was living in new york. that i could have passed him in the street, and most likely did, fills me with some non-specific sense of loss, of having missed an opportunity even if, at that age, i most likely wouldn't have taken it.

so when queried on peony moon as to why i hadn't mentioned george mackay brown i was surprised to feel myself experiencing something of the same. the short answer as to why i hadn't mentioned george mackay brown is that the question related to poets and mackay brown is simply a writer whose poetry i'm not that familiar with. the novels yes but, beyond the inscription on his gravestone, not so the poetry.

not so very long ago i was listening sorley maclean and having a bit of difficulty with it so i went to see one of my workmates who was a first language gaelic speaker to ask her what the deal was. oh, she said, he's from skye but not only that he speaks bodach gaelic, old man's gaelic. and there it was that divide not only between me (mangled college lewis gaelic) and my hearrach (harris) speaking colleague but also an age related thing, a language passing and past. out in uig somewhere there's a handwritten text of old gaelic seafaring and boat language, all gone now. apparently it was to be published but there was some shenanigans with the publishers doing what gaelic speakers do, fiddling with it, changing it and that's the last i ever heard of it.

going back to orkney now everything i remember is gone. the trees i planted when i was wee are thirty feet high (an answer to that old trope that trees won't grow - plant some!), the house i lived in is now in a housing estate, the places and names that are so familiar yet strange on my tongue are not the memories i have of them. kirkwall is much like any other wee town, lovelier i'll grant you, but still much the same. it's stromness i like to walk through - the flagstones don't seem to have lost their age, there's no way to unjumble the houses and closes.

i'm guessing mackay brown was still here when i was wee. i can't say i didn't know this, he was writing for the orcadian so i must have read him at some point but i was too young to be reading his novels and even then i was more interested in the sagas. severed heads versus mackay brown would've been no contest!

my own copy of greenvoe is up on the shelf beside where i'm writing this, nearly thirty years old. i take it down, marvel at the cheapness (which wasn't so cheap in the day) open it up and find the inscription inside faded and watermarked into the opposite page. here's a good book for you to read it says. and it's not wrong. where we lived in bruntsfield was still a bit ragged, not what it's become these days and this book was, i imagine, bought in the wee book shop across the street (long since gone, the same place i would buy the copy of lanark that sits beside greenvoe.

i remember being alone in the bruntsfield flat reading it for the first time. what a brilliant book. it wasn't so much what it talked about - even at seventeen i knew that life was done - but the manner in which it did. this was the orkney i remembered, the old geezers down the harbour who were dying out even in my time. i remember, like timmy (tho much later), having to sign for meths! maybe on the smaller islands there was still a life that resembled what mackay brown described but on the mainland change was coming hard.

so that's where it sits, alongside hawkfall, magnus and the sun's net. i don't read them much these days. vanished landscapes are all fine and good except when they're your own. i remember coming up over the hill to kirkwall after years of absence and not recognising the place. not for the worse, you can see where the oil money's gone but as if the world has slipped, become strange.

maybe i'll read it this afternoon, the rain is hosing down and the bike seems just too uncomfortable a proposition, but most likely i won't. these days, as seems to be the way for those of us who read his prose when we were younger, it seems it's his poetry that's emerging in insistent fragments...

(you can get lots of mackay brown info here and hear him reading here)

A Work for Poets

To have carved on the days of our vanity

A sun

A ship

A star

A cornstalk

Also a few marks

From an ancient forgotten time

A child may read

That not far from the stone

A well

Might open for wayfarers

Here is a work for poets -

Carve the runes

Then be content with silence.