Matthew Robb Brown

Matthew Robb Brown

With poems composed over five decades, but predominantly for his 2016 Ashland University MFA thesis of the same title, Again With the Light is a collection drawn from an entire life. It comes, first, from a childhood on the autistic spectrum, improperly diagnosed, in which a fascination with forests, trees, birds, water, and rough pathways of the literal and metaphorical kind provide a landscape of imagery for the whole. A lifelong attraction toward Christ leads through numerous permutations of faith and various communities to Eastern Orthodoxy, an earthy, unearthly place with a connection to things like kenosis and theosis. Along the way come lives of saints and prosodic experiments in a post-modern but reachable style.

Matthew Robb Brown has been writing and publishing poetry since 1969. He earned his master’s of fine arts in poetry at Ashland University (2016). His first collection of poetry, Again With the Light, is available from Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock (2020). Matthew’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies, most recently Image 102 and The Merton Journal (Advent 2021).