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Terry Gifford

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Letters (1)

Dear Tim,

     I confess to being the ‘English critic’ who succeeded in annoying Sheenagh Pugh (Thumbscrew 15) by daring to suggest that George Mackay Brown’s poetry idealised Orkney into an Arcadia. I can reassure her that my book which she tactfully “didn’t choose to advertise”, Green Voices, is out of print. The bad news is that my view has not changed in my recent study of the genre, Pastoral. Thumbscrew ought to be a place where such heretical views could be aired. But suffice it here to say that in both books I gave evidence from the poems for a fatalistic, ahistorical reductiveness behind Mackay Brown’s mythic “green fable”. Typically, the only “green” poem he wrote, ‘Uranium’, against the drilling for uranium in Orkney in the 1970s, he tried to suppress.

     A bit of seasonal harshness is necessary, but in Arcadia the uses of adversity are, in the end “sweet” to the pastoral poet. The generality of Mackay Brown’s mythic Orkney, where, in his own words, “the layers of history and culture cease to matter”, passes over, for example, the Clearances and their particular brutalities, still remembered today in David Craig’s oral history research, On The Crofters’ Trail. Naming places that are empty is not enough. The living is in the detail of the layers of history, isn’t it?

Yours sincerely,
Terry Gifford

 

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