SOURCE: A review of Selected Poems, 1954–1992, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 243, No. 40, September 30, 1996, p. 84.

In the following review, the critic describes Brown as gifted in "sharpening one's interest in genuinely rustic activities."

Gathering the best-known work of one of the leading poets in the Scottish Literary renaissance, this volume displays Mackay Brown's gift for sharpening one's interest in genuinely rustic activities. In his world, a rough-hewn, remote island off the shore of Northern Scotland marked by anvils, spades and nets, stone kirks and bowls of ale, seasonal imagery and the lusciousness of agrarian life are explored with vigor and depth. After a day-long trip to the market: "The sun whirled on a golden hoof. It lingered. It fell / On a nest of flares." In another song, the poet recounts a blinding storm: "In summer's sultry throat / Dry thunder stammered. / … Next morning in tranced sunshine / The corn lay squashed on...