By early 1977, he was entering a period of depression which lasted intermittently for almost a decade, but maintained his working routine throughout. [57] He also had severe bronchial problems, his condition becoming so serious that in early 1981 he was given the Last Sacraments. [58] Writing came easily to him. "He was amazed," said a friend, "at the effortlessness of his writing, incredulous that anything so easily accomplished could have any value." Slipping smoothly between past and present, he linked ancient sagas and modern events. Yet though he wrote of Nazi Germany and Eastern desert kings, he was at his best when telling about Orkney's people—a "mingled weave" of Norsemen, Picts, Icelanders and Scots with "stories in the air." He devoted two books to his islands— An Orkney Tapestry (1969) and Portrait of Orkney (1981)—but all his novels, poems, stories, plays and children's books reveled in Orcadiana. Over 20 of his works were set to music by the Orkney composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies—most notably the opera "The Martyrdom of St. Magnus" (1977)—and together Brown and Davies founded the annual St. Magnus Festival in Kirkwall. Maxwell Davies’s response to the uranium mining threat was ‘The Yellow Cake Review’, ‘Comments in words and music on the threat of Uranium mining in Orkney. For voice and piano. Text by the composer’. 7 The ‘Composer’s Note’ to the score describes the pieces as ‘cabaret style numbers’, and they were first performed at the St Magnus Festival in June 1980 – Maxwell Davies had established the Festival in 1977, largely as a vehicle for performing his work. It is now one of the most successful cultural gatherings in Scotland, after the Edinburgh Festival. The first performance of ‘The Yellow Cake Review’ was given in the upstairs bar of the Stromness Hotel, with Max at the piano, and Eleanor Bron the soloist. It must have been a wonderful evening. ‘Yellow Cake’ refers to refined uranium ore, and Maxwell Davies’ Note describes ‘the threat … to the economy and ecology of the Orkney Islands, which islanders are determined to fight, down to the last person.’ 8

SOURCE: A review of Selected Poems, 1954–1992, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 243, No. 40, September 30, 1996, p. 84. Though Brown thought himself a mere craftsman, his death this year in Kirkwall, Orkney's capital, brought tributes proper to an artist. In London, The Tablet called him "a giant of literature and much loved"; The Guardian found him "a major influence" and a leader of "the Scottish literary renaissance"; The Times named his last novel "a magisterial summing-up of the purpose and meaning of man's life." Perse, Saint-John (1930), Anabasis. A poem by St.-J. Perse, with a translation into English by T. S. Eliot. Brown's poetry and prose have been seen as characterised by "the absence of frills and decoration; the lean simplicity of description, colour, shape and action reduced to essentials, which heightens the reality of the thing observed," [90] while "his poems became informed by a unique voice that was his alone, controlled and dispassionate, which allowed every word to play its part in the narrative scheme of the unfolding poem." [91]Mostly, it was a quietly difficult life of the imagination. "Sacrificed" is too strong a word. As is "cowardice". Brown could do nothing else. He has been well served by his biographer, as he was by his friends. He was held in such affection by the Orkney people that his funeral in St Magnus Cathedral was the first Catholic mass to have been held there since the Reformation. Furthermore, it fell on April 16, St Magnus's Day. As the minister said: "If you call that a coincidence, I wish you a very dull life." SOURCE: A review of Beside the Ocean of Time, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 35, August 29, 1994, p. 63. A Spell for Green Corn (radio play; broadcast, 1967; produced in Edinburgh, 1970; adaptation produced at Perth Theatre, 1972), Hogarth, 1970.

SOURCE: A review of Following a Lark and Selected Poems, 1954–1992, in Booklist, Vol. 93, No. 5, November 1, 1996, p. 475. Photographs and words together form an unusual procession of contemplative insights into the small part of the world that poet and photographer know so intimately. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, 1983, Volume 27: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1945-1960, 1984; Volume 139: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945-1980, 1994, pp. 29-39. Cleaned up, and eating his dinner, Freddie became talkative. I relaxed into his stories. During the war, his frail wooden house had been surrounded by the huge airstrip on Mainland. He went to sleep, woke up to the (beautiful) sound of Merlin engines as Spitfires landed, took off. He had fond memories of the pilots, ‘fine beuys’, with whom he had made some friends. He reached under his pillow, and brought out a creased, browning photo of a Spitfire and its pilot, who had autographed the souvenir, ‘For Freddie’. On his table, I noticed a card, some kind of invitation, with a horseshoe on its cover. To make conversation, I asked Freddie what he was being invited to. He smiled in a knowing way, ‘Ah beuy, that will be a secret. As secret as the Horseman’s Word.’

Major Works

The museum stands on its own pier within spitting distance of the small ex-council flat where Brown spent the latter half of his life. By the 1990s he was obliged to pin notices on his front door. "No callers before 2pm", or "WORKING ALL DAY", but still people came. In one letter Brown, ever a seeker after solitude and silence, notes wearily that "200 people have called this summer". Some came clutching copies of Greenvoe or An Orkney Tapestry to be signed, others merely to clap eyes on this near-mythic island bard. Today, a decade after his death, he is being further woven into the Orkney tourist experience - landscape photographs with lines from his poetry decorate the ferry which serves the islands. For about six months, she lent Brown prints of the photographs she had chosen for the book, which was to be published at the opening of a first retrospective of her work…. The images were propped on an easel, several at a time, in Brown's sitting room. Moberg had asked him just for short captions. But secretly—until the final drafts—he wrote full-fledged poems, 48 in all. He was born in the fishing town of Stromness. Leaving school at an early age, he worked as a journalist. At 30, he resumed his education at Newbattle Abbey College on the mainland, where he came under the tutelage of the poet Edwin Muir, who was also from the Orkneys. In 1954, Mr. Muir wrote the introduction to Mr. Brown's first collection of poetry, The Storm and Other Poems. Loaves and Fishes was published in 1959, followed by The Year of the Whale and Fishermen With Plows: A Poem Cycle, often regarded as his finest poetic work. His other books of verse include Winterfold and Poems New and Selected. Brown was awarded an OBE in the 1974 New Year Honours List. The period after completing Magnus, however, was marked by one of Brown's acute periods of mental distress. [53] Yet he maintained a stream of writing: poetry, children's stories, and a weekly column in the local newspaper, The Orcadian, which ran from 1971 to the end of his life. [54] A first selection of them appeared as Letter from Hamnavoe in 1975. [55]