Poetry

Welcome to my (Robert G. Brown's) poetry collections. I have been writing poetry almost as long as I have been writing at all, and have diligently collected and tuned and edited my poetry over decades. Below are two books of poetry made available for free via the web. There are poems on many subjects -- the nature of God, love, nature, both whimsical and very serious indeed. There is an epic poem about an event (global nuclear war) that has not happened yet, but is even now one possible description of our ending as a species. I grew up with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation and (as a physicist) pretty well understood how it would come about. There are a number of poetic images of Buddha -- I am not exactly a Buddhist, but then, Buddha (any of them) wasn't a Buddhist either.

Feel free to browse the poetry collections below and to bookmark or make personal copies of any that you like. I also welcome comments or feedback -- it is always lovely to hear from a reader that they found my poetry and particularly liked or were moved by (or even disliked) some particular poem. There is a link to my email address immediately below.

All poetry below is published under a modified Open Publication License that permits unlimited free noncommercial and personal use. It may not be published in any form or media that is sold for profit. The details of the license can be viewed here and in each available version viewed below. Stats for this page can be viewed here.

Commercial publishers interested in producing an actual book (or other media form) of the poetry below are encouraged to contact the author. As is anyone else in the world, of course (except spammers). I cherish reader feedback.

As a bit of an experiment, I've put this site onto the Cruxweb Poetry Webring devoted to serious poems. If you like any of my poetry, you are reasonably likely to enjoy things from farther up or down the ring. Feel free to check it out.

Who Shall Sing, When Man is Gone (HTML online version).

A "Web Book" collection of poetry by Robert G. Brown, written over thirty or more years. The poems are fairly stable, but I'm still moving them about (and may move more over to the second collection as the book is pretty long).

If you wish to print this collection for private, noncommercial, nondistributed use only you may, using this Postscript or this PDF image. Note that these binary images are quite large (more than 200KB) and may take a while to load on a slow connection.

Hot Tea! (HTML online version).

A second "Web Book" collection of somewhat more recent poetry by Robert G. Brown (including works in progress). Somewhat volatile, this collection is subject to change as it as augmented or edited. All new works will appear here until I consider the collection "full" and start a third.