Fountain of Bandages

Of Anglo-Indian and Celtic ancestry, Nicholas Mason-Browne was born in

Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1951. The son of a psychiatrist and an art teacher,

he grew up in western Canada and Belize, where his father was

superintendent of the mental hospital. His first poem was a ballad that

responded to the traumatic events of November 22, 1963. He completed

high school in the Peace River country in 1969 and went on to attend the

University of British Columbia, where he benefited in particular from the

courses in anthropology and Spanish. After graduation, he settled in the

Yukon Territory for almost five years, working in a range of occupations,

including hotel night clerk and movie critic of The Yukon News.

Between 1979 and 1989, he earned three advanced degrees at

the University of Iowa. Thereafter, he worked as a professor at Coe College,

Iowa, for more than thirty years, specializing in modern Latin-American

fiction and poetry. However, his published research was in the field of

Whitman studies, which engaged his interest after he had occasion to speak

with the Whitman scholar and biographer, Gay Wilson Allen, at a conference

in 1992. As a separate matter, a retrospective cd of some of his own poetry,

entitled Battered, Ephemeral Tune, was recorded in 2019.

He currently lives with his wife, a Brazilianist, in a farmhouse in

the Iowa countryside. Among other things, he collects Revolutionary and

Civil War "paper" - that is, historical documents. A lifelong islomane,

he is especially fond of certain islands such as McNabs Island in Nova Scotia,

Orcas Island, Inishbofin, Menorca, Rapa Nui, Steeple Jason in the Falklands,

Isla Navarino, and Tierra del Fuego.