George Mackay Brown: The poet, his muse and a £30,000 collection

• Collection offers insight into poet’s most creative years

• Poems and letters being sold by Mackay Brown’s former muse

• Correspondence includes 100 letters and 13 unpublished poems

The collection, offering an almost complete picture of Mackay Brown’s life and thoughts over ten of his most creative and prolific years, will be sold by Edinburgh auctioneer Lyon & Turnbull on Tuesday and is expected to make in excess of £30,000.

The hand-written correspondence includes 100 letters and 13 unpublished poems to the Edinburgh artist Kenna Crawford. They celebrate her birthday, Christmas and wedding, and include poems titled Gossip in Hamnavoe, A Carol for Kenna, A Dream of Fair Women and The Prince and the Heather.

Numerous other poems are included in among the letters, together with Crawford’s 1985 sketchbook, in which Mackay Brown, who died of cancer in 1996, wrote a poem for her, Kenna’s Return to Orkney, 6 May 1986.

Also included in the sale are signed typescripts of various poems and the uncorrected typescript of The Ballad of the Golden Bird, inscribed and dedicated to Crawford, as well as photographs of Mackay Brown with her – “a lissom, lovely creature”.

Crawford, 52, told The Scotsman: “Selling George’s poems and letters has been the hardest decision of my life. George told me several times that I should hold on to his letters, that dealers would ‘pay big money’ for them. I got quite upset, saying I’d never do such a thing, but it is an important collection.

“It’s a responsibility looking after something so special. I’ve had all the letters and memorabilia in a box for years, so I hope that whoever buys them will keep them in Scotland, making them available to as many people as possible.”

Crawford, who lives in Carlops in the Borders with her photographer husband Graham McGirk, was 26 years old when she met Mackay Brown, a key figure in 20th-century Scottish literature, at his modest Stromness flat. They were introduced by his former lover, the Viennese jeweller and silversmith Nora Kennedy.

Mackay Brown had not written for almost a year, following the death from alcoholism of Stella Cartwright, “the Muse of Rose Street” who inspired a generation of Scottish poets and to whom he had briefly been engaged in 1960.

“I met George almost a year to the day after Stella’s death,” said Crawford, a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art.

Mackay Brown immediately began the correspondence with his “sweet star”, and it lasted until November 1994. His final poem to her is dated 20 September, 1995, only six months before he died.

In the letters, Mackay Brown repeatedly thanks Crawford for touching his heart and his imagination, “for filling my lamp of verse with oil …”

When Crawford left to spend a year in New Zealand, he wrote: “I do know the muse that will help me to do good work even though she’s flying to the far end of the earth.”

He also wrote of his periodic depressions, saying: “It’s no good giving way to them. One cure is to work hard and turn all that dark energy into creating things.”

He told Crawford: “Sometimes your face gleams on my memory, along with the music of your voice; and then I feel very happy.”

Book specialist Simon Vickers said of the poems and letters: “This is a remarkable collection.”

He added that the letters were hugely informative, as well as full of amusing gossip about Mackay Brown and his life.

Words inspired by woman who was ‘sweet star’ of a woman

Below are extracts from George Mackay Brown’s A Dream of Fair Women, a poem that he wrote “To Kenna” in March 1987.

“The tinker trudges from farm to farm,

With her pack of clothes-pegs and herbs,

She goes in a slow dance”

“She lingers in the meadow

The bright-haired child

A flower chain flows from her fingers.”

“At daffodil time came Kenna

Her kiss

Opened the door to the corn and the honeycombs.”