the Inconclusive Rule

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Robert Arnold Johnson is a physician (M.D., University of Washington School of Medicine, 1969) whose career has spanned two epochs of specialty over a nearly half-century: internal medicine and cardiology (1969-2001) and psychiatry (2004-2018). It has included teaching and research (Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston; Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia), and private practice in Boston and in a small city in Washington State, Walla Walla, the state in which he grew up—east of the Cascades, a decidedly rural world. He is the author of more than forty medically related publications, and he co-edited The Practice of Cardiology, a popular textbook of the 1980s. He is currently busy with a philosophical work on the nature of identity and its implications for medical care with a co-author, the philosopher Thomas Alderson Davis.