Work
Brown's poetry and prose have been described as characterised by "the absence of frills and decoration;the lean simplicity of description, colour shape and action reduced to essentials, which heightens the reality of the thing observed. While "his poems became informed by a unique voice that was his alone, controlled and dispassionate, which allowed every word to play its part in the narrative scheme of the unfolding poem".
Mackay Brown gained most of his inspiration from his native islands, in poems, stories and novels which ranged through time. He drew on the Icelandic Orkneyinga Saga, especially in his novel Magnus. Seamus Heaney said that passed everything "through the eye of the needle of Orkney".
Read more about this topic: George Mackay Brown
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“We have not the motive to prepare ourselves for a “life-work” of teaching, of social work—we know that we would lay it down with hallelujah in the height of our success, to make a home for the right man. And all the time in the background of our consciousness rings the warning that perhaps the right man will never come. A great love is given to very few. Perhaps this make-shift time filler of a job is our life work after all.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods.... Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)