The Inconclusive Rule

By Robert Arnold Johnson

None of these poems have been previously published. I am the photographer for all the pictures you’ll see in the book. I was inspired to make use of the photographs, all originally taken for a different purpose, by W. G. Sebald’s use of photographs in his novel Austerlitz. Which is not to pretend to the moral and tragic dimension of that great work: these poems are motivated most often toward whimsy, stillness, or both, to which the photos are point and counterpoint. They were written over the quarter century between 1985 and 2010. I am now seventy-five years of age; I will not be writing more of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984518736

Robert Arnold Johnson

Robert Arnold Johnson (www.rajohnsonmd.org) is a physician whose career spanned two epochs of specialty over nearly a half century: cardiology and internal medicine 1969-2001; psychiatry 2004-2018. He is the author of more than forty medically related publications, including co-editing The Practice of Cardiology, a popular textbook of the 1980s. His book of short poems, the Inconclusive Rule was published by Xlibris in March 2018 (www.robertarnoldjohnson.com). A philosophical work co-authored with Thomas Alderson Davis on the nature of identity and its implication for medical practice, Story by Story: Who I Am, What I Suffer, will be released (Cambridge Scholars Publishers) during 2019. He is married, now thirty years, to the violinist and author Susan Eileen Pickett.

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Copyright © 2018 by Robert Arnold Johnson.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018903887

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-9845-1871-2

                Softcover      978-1-9845-1872-9

                eBook           978-1-9845-1873-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 04/19/2019

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

Books of poetry usually come without a note or preface. I beg an exception for this one. Whether my reasons persuade, I leave to you.

None of these poems have been previously published.¹ I am the photographer for all of the pictures you’ll see in the book, including the cover. In two instances I have taken a photograph of a photograph, one shot decades earlier by another. I was inspired to make use of the photographs, all originally taken for a different purpose, by W.G. Sebald’s use of photographs in his novel Austerlitz. Which is not to pretend to the moral and tragic dimension of that