SOURCE: A review of The Wreck of the Archangel, in Booklist, Vol. 91, No. 21, July, 1995, p. 1855.

In the following review, Olson finds that Brown's poems "telescope the centuries."

Although not old-fashioned, Brown's poetry frequently seems ancient. [In The Wreck of the Archangel] Brown recalls the earliest history of his homeland—Orkney is the first archipelago north of the Scottish mainland and boasts some of the oldest Stone Age buildings in the British Isles—in verses that advert to Norse Vikings, the Romans before them, and, yet earlier, the semilegendary Picts. He often writes the oldest kinds of poems in English: calendar poems, riddling or question-and-answer poems, bestiaries, songs about the saints and holy days, verses on the most elemental things—a whole suite of poems here is about stone—in which the normally voiceless subjects speak their thoughts. He also writes splendidly of the experiences of the farmers, fishers...