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NotebookSeptember 1996 George Mackay Brown, 1921-1996 On the life & work of the Scottish poet 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 ward ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 15 September 1996, on page 145 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/georgemackaybrown-richman-3525
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