Spine Poetry

A recent fad - take a selection of books and arrange them in order so their titles make a poem. It's too cold to do anything today, hibernation seems like a good idea right now, so dug out a handful of George Mackay Browns to see what I could come up with. I cheated, and added link words ...

Andrina, a
Witch, with her
Pictures in a Cave
Under Brinkie's Brae, wove, during the
First Wash of Spring,
A Spell for Green Corn, but it was just one of those
Winter's Tales.


George Mackay Brown 1926-1996, otherwise known as the Bard of Orkney.
George was born and lived all his life in Stromness, Orkney, rarely travelling except with his mind. He wrote about "the marvellous in the ordinary" in numerous stories, poems, and articles for the Orcadian newspaper, plus a handful of novels. That George thought of life as a journey is illustrated many times, as in the poem A New Child:

Wait a while, small voyager
On the shore, with seapinks and shells.

The boat
Will take a few summers to build
That you must make your voyage in

GMB 11th June 1993
You can see the original manuscript in George's own hand Here or the finished printed version Here
The poem was written for the birth of Emma Catherine Lawson, who if memory serves is the daughter of the then Stromness Librarian.