Fishermen with Ploughs

Fishermen with Ploughs by George MacKay Brown, from The Collected Poems of George MacKay Brown, 58 pages

Fishermen with Ploughs, a collection first published in 1971, is a poetical-historical tour of the Orkney Isles, where the author makes his home.  It begins with the arrival of Norse settlers fleeing trouble at home, drifts through Christianization and Reformation and Modernization, when so many native Orcadians left for greener pastures elsewhere, then concludes in the near future with new refugees fleeing some fresh disaster renewing the cycle.

If not for the introduction, however, only the keenest of readers would have unriddled that plot.  The contents vary greatly in length and style, giving brief glimpses of the isles and their inhabitants in a land where man and nature interpenetrate.  Songs of mothers and widows and graves dug in the sea, the books of the earth and the seas of corn, the plough of the boat's prow and the sea salt on the wind, hearts like stones and stones like men, the year and the week and the days going round, the great ghostly crowds of those who have gone before but are here still in wall and path and churchyard.