Not unexpectedly, he is sometimes accused of being "negative" or "anti-modern," but often enough, as in Vernon Young's evaluation, Brown is praised as the "most wizard shape to appear in British poetry since Dylan Thomas," who is "giving back to poetry much of its ancient courtesy," commemorating "human mischief," and casting "spells about our ears." Young extolls "The Condemned Well" (in
The Year of the Whale, 1965) as a "cantata of his skills, a work I have promptly added to my select anthology of great poems about the finite world."
Brown was born on 17 October 1921 in Stromness, a small fishing and shipbuilding seaport town of about fifteen hundred residents on the southwest coast of the island of Orkney. Stromness is located about twenty miles from one of the chief medieval monuments of pre-Protestant Scotland, St. Magnus Cathedral. Brown refers to his place of birth and sixty-year residence by its original name, Hamnavoe (Icelandic for "haven-bay"), poeticizing the legends, myths, sagas, archaeological sites, and historical as well as contemporary residents not only of this native seaport town but just as often of the entire Orkney archipelago.
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