SOURCE: "Orkney," in The Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 1996, pp. 16-17.

In the following review, Andreae considers Brown's posthumously published Following a Lark and Orkney: Pictures and Poems.

In an island, time is a simple pure circle.

The line is from a recently published poem by George Mackay Brown (1921–1996). Brown, a prolific source of poems, novels, short stories, and other forms of writing all closely connected with his native Orkney, had islands—and the concept of pure circles and cycles of time—in his veins.

Orkney, at the northeastern tip of mainland Scotland, across the Pentland Firth, is not, strictly speaking, "an" island. It is 67 islands. Sixteen of them are inhabited by people and cows; many more by birds. Even a hasty visitor (the only kind of visitor I have so far been) to this remote outpost of Britain immediately senses that to Orcadians, the archipelago is unquestionably the...