Thomas Edward Brown is the national poet of the Isle of Man, an island in the Irish Sea. Like other nineteenth-century writers influenced by Wordsworth, Brown sought to write "in the language really used by men." Eighty percent of Brown's poetry is written in the English dialect spoken by the modern Manx. Brown hoped, according to the dedication of his first collection of Manx narratives in 1881, "To unlock the treasures of the Island heart." In his 1887 dedication to The Doctor and Other Poems, he promised to fix Manx life upon the page,

That so the coming age,
   Lost in the empire's mass,
...................here
May see, as in a glass,
   What they held dear.

Brown's narrative gift and fine sense of character sustain tales with superlative energy. His poems have the character of nineteenth-century photographs--solid and determined. They also have Brown's antic humor and a...