George Mackay Brown’s death this year, at the age of seventy-four, is a terrible blow: he was Scotland’s finest poet, and one
of the finest in all Britain. In a New York Times obituary,
the Irish poet Seamus Heaney said that he had
never seen Brown’s poetry sufficiently praised. I would concur,
and add that Brown’s work had never been sufficiently published,
either, at least not in the United States, where only some of
Brown’s fiction and children’s books have appeared.
When I think of
the lack of regard accorded Brown’s poetry on this side of the
Atlantic, it is hard not to think of his predecessor and mentor
Edwin Muir, another Scotsman whose work is unknown to many
American readers.

Brown, like Muir, was from Orkney, the remote group of
islands
north of the Highland region; the two met while the younger
poet was a student at Newbattle Abbey, the college where Muir was
warden. Some years later, Muir wrote an introduction to Brown’s
first book, The Storm and Other Poems (1954). In The Wreck
of the Archangel (1989), Brown’s penultimate volume of poems,
there are four poems to Muir written on the one-hundredth
anniversary of his birth.
Even without knowledge of
these poems or of Brown’s tutelage under Muir, the lineage
between him and the older poet is obvious. Both poets wrote
poems of breathtaking simplicity. Both poets wrote poems that—despite
the simple surface— sacrifice nothing of reality’s
complexity. And both
turned to verse late in