Arthur Brown

Arthur Brown's new manuscript was a finalist for the National Poetry series and other poetry book competitions. His poem "The Studio" was published in the May 2025 issue of Plume and he has poems forthcoming in The New Criterion and The Kenyon Review. Seven poems from the manuscript were featured with an introductory essay by the editor in Janus Head 19.1, and others were published in American Journal of Poetry, Southwest Review, and an earlier issue of Janus Head. He has published two poetry books, Duration and the Second Hand (David Robert, 2013) and The Mackerel at St. Ives (David Robert, 2008). Poems from these collections were published in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Agni, and other journals, and have won the Morton Marr Poetry Prize and the American Literary Review poetry prize. He has recently published essays in Janus Head and Philosophy and Literature and his one-act play won the Arts & Letters Drama Prize. He is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Evansville now living with his wife in Chupadero, New Mexico near Santa Fe.

"Premonition" is the first poem in his first book, The Mackerel at St. Ives:

A sort of surfacing it seemed to be, / as of a fish into the light and air / that for an instant, as it's hanging there / with a strangely steadfast certainty / takes up the currents of another sphere, / before it drops again into its own-- / heavy as a triply skipping stone / that will at last forever disappear. / Five gulls, their calls, the crescent moon and sky, / the gray unearthly white against the blue, / the spirit-sounding things of sea and shore / conjoin to lure my untrained ear and eye / to the endlessness of my own death-- / then leave me stranded here to live some more.