He is virtually a twentieth-century poet laureate of these northern islands. The Old Norse name for Stromness appears in the title of his volume of collected newspaper commentaries on specifically Orkneyian and generally Scottish matters,
Letters from Hamnavoe (1975), and in such poems as "The Twelve Piers of Hamnavoe," "Hamnavoe Market," and "Hamnavoe."
In "Hamnavoe," the harbor of the town is imaginatively transformed into something approximating William Butler Yeats's mythical city of Byzantium: "Herring boats, / Puffing red sails, the tillers / Of cold horizons, leaned / Down the gullgaunt tide // And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests." But whereas in "Sailing to Byzantium" Yeats leaves his native land to voyage back in Mediterranean history to an imaginary and mystical "Byzantium," Brown by contrast remains in the seedtown of his birth, reconceiving it as the medieval Hamnavoe in order to combat what he consistently regards as the "greyness of contemporary life."
His father, John Brown, whose job as postman is the subject of the poem "Hamnavoe" ("My father passed with his penny letters / Through closes opening and shutting like legends"), was born in 1875 and was married in 1910 to Mhairi Sheena Mackay, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a crofter-fisherman of Strathy, Sutherland, and a native speaker of Gaelic.
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