The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry

by Cassandra Atherton (editor), Paul Hetherington (editor)

Prose poetry is a resurgent literary form in the English-speaking world and has been rapidly gaining popularity in Australia. Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington have gathered a broad and representative selection of the best Australian prose poems written over the last fifty years. The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetryin cludes numerous distinguished prose poets; Jordie Albiston, Joanne burns, Gary Catalano, Anna Couani, Alex Skovron, Samuel Wagan Watson, Ania Walwicz and many more; and documents prose poetry's growing appeal over recent decades, from the poetic margins to the mainstream. This collection reframes our understanding not only of this dynamic poetic form, but of Australian poetry as a whole.

Genres: Poetry

222 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Lee Kofman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this anthology very much, also for its insightful and very accessible introduction to this relatively unknown, I'd say, genre, and it made me want to read and write more prose poetry. The collection is very diverse and has many gems. Some of my very favorites here are by the incredible Ania Walwicz whom I had the pleasure to know, Javant Biarujia, Peter Boyle, Eileen Chong, Cassie Lewis, Josephine Rowe, Alex Skovron, Vicki Viidikas as well as the poems by the editors themselves.

[Declan Fry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of Joan Didion’s clipped style in A Book of Common Prayer, Martin Amis once remarked: “The most poetic thing about Miss Didion’s prose in this novel is that it doesn’t go all the way across the page.”

Amis wasn’t halfway wrong. But (an unfortunate, if inescapable, correlate of this) he was also only halfway right.

Prose poetry is a rulebreaker: disdainful of stanzas and lineation, it regularly runs across the page. One thinks of the Argentinian poet Roberto Juarroz, who described a man meeting “some strange capital letters”: “And a great fear chokes him/of finding a word/written all in capitals/and not being able to pronounce it.”

For a long time, prose was the word that poetry couldn’t pronounce. Charles Baudelaire, in 1869, assumed the role of speech pathologist with Petits poèmes en prose (in English, Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka: A Prose Poem, is perhaps the earliest example). Baudelaire’s model was as necessary for 1870s France, the editors of this anthology suggest, as local proponents were amid the moribund, dun-coloured landscape of 1970s Australia, where Gough Whitlam famously activated a flurry of pearl clutching after his government purchased Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles.

Faced with anthologies such as this, the point of the critic, I am afraid to say, becomes fairly pointless; all I can offer are my services as hapless cicerone: pointing out the sights, directing readers to the relevant landmarks.

Read on: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fabulous collection of prose poetry with a very informative introduction.
One I will be getting for my own collection and dipping into often.

[Chloe · Rating 2 out of 5]

A strange collection… for me, there were five excellent poems, a handful of good poems, and a large amount of very bad poems. Overall, disappointing.