Arthur Brown

Arthur Brown is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Evansville.  His poems are featured, along with an introductory note by the editor, in Janus Head 19.1 (May 2021) and can be read at the journal's website.  The poems are from a manuscript that was a finalist for the National Poetry Series' 2020 Competition, and also for the Marsh Hawk and the Washington poetry prizes.  His two poetry books are Duration and the Second Hand (David Robert, 2013) and The Mackerel at St. Ives (David Robert, 2008), he has published poems in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Agni, and a number of other journals, and his poems have won the Morton Marr Poetry Prize and the American Literary Review poetry prize.

"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 on 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.