'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 Poetry includes 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.' (Publication summary)
(Publication abstract)
'Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington offer us this anthology of 160 prose poems by 149 Australian poets, including Bruce Dawe, Bruce Beaver, John Blight, Vincent Buckley, Michael Dransfield, John Forbes, Rae Desmond Jones, Rudi Kraussman, Tatjana Lukic, Vicki Vidiikas and the late Ania Walwicz.' (Introduction)
'A book that has been long awaited, Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, provides an overview of how prose poetry has come into the Australian poetic landscape while presenting a variety of prose poems written by Australian poets who are breaking away from conservative, traditional poetic forms. These poets stand next to one another here—as a sort of resistance—unified by a shared belief that prose can and should be an acceptable entry for poetics. The featured poems are varied in content while also providing examples of how a prose poem might approach taking up space on the page. Each block of text uncovers a unique truth: "Until now, and despite the excellence of prose poetry in Australia, there has never been such an anthology, although poets since 2002 … have called for one to be published, … the result of relative neglect of prose poetry by critics and editors in Australia" (1). The anthology opens with a fourteen-page essay of exposition from the editors that seeks to explain the why of the book and bring readers to a level ground of understanding before experiencing the delight to come.' (Introduction)
'What is it about English language poetry that has proved so resistant to the lure of the prose poem? The French, it appears, held no such qualms, finding themselves besotted with the form ever since Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire began dispensing with line breaks and stanzas. Of course, the very existence of English-language works like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) or William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell (1920) could be used to argue otherwise, but such endeavours were considered too eccentric at the time to impart a lasting legacy. Perhaps if T.S. Eliot, whose antipathy towards the prose poem is well known, had given us a major cycle along the lines of Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis (1924), a work he admired and translated, things might have turned out differently.' (Introduction)
'Considerable work has gone into this wide-ranging anthology, which the editors describe as ” a representative and compelling selection … written by Australians since the 1970s… (and including) a generous selection of twenty-first-century prose poems.”' (Introduction)
'Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington offer us this anthology of 160 prose poems by 149 Australian poets, including Bruce Dawe, Bruce Beaver, John Blight, Vincent Buckley, Michael Dransfield, John Forbes, Rae Desmond Jones, Rudi Kraussman, Tatjana Lukic, Vicki Vidiikas and the late Ania Walwicz.' (Introduction)
'A book that has been long awaited, Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, provides an overview of how prose poetry has come into the Australian poetic landscape while presenting a variety of prose poems written by Australian poets who are breaking away from conservative, traditional poetic forms. These poets stand next to one another here—as a sort of resistance—unified by a shared belief that prose can and should be an acceptable entry for poetics. The featured poems are varied in content while also providing examples of how a prose poem might approach taking up space on the page. Each block of text uncovers a unique truth: "Until now, and despite the excellence of prose poetry in Australia, there has never been such an anthology, although poets since 2002 … have called for one to be published, … the result of relative neglect of prose poetry by critics and editors in Australia" (1). The anthology opens with a fourteen-page essay of exposition from the editors that seeks to explain the why of the book and bring readers to a level ground of understanding before experiencing the delight to come.' (Introduction)
(Publication abstract)
'Until recently, Australian prose poetry hasn’t attracted much attention – we’re not sure why. Having written prose poetry for years, we’re both fascinated by the form, which can be loosely defined as poems written in paragraphs and sentences rather than in stanzas and lines.' (Introduction)
