It is timely, then, that editors Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington have gathered a generous sampling of Australian prose poems in The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, which represents the work of some 170 poets. Both practising poets, Atherton and Hetherington are well tasked for the role, having co-edited Rabbit 19: The Prose Poetry issue (2016) and collaborated on an academic study, Prose Poetry: An introduction, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Any editorial sampling of prose poems must first deal with the elephant in the room: what is a prose poem, and what distinguishes it from poetic prose? Many poets and novelists, after all, have published prose that can be deemed poetic. Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) is certainly poetic, but you would be hard pressed to argue it as a prose poem. Franz Kafka’s micro-stories might be considered prose poems but for his status as a writer of prose. And what of the short fictions of Lydia Davis or Diane Williams?

While Atherton and Hetherington acknowledge these complexities, they nevertheless set out the measure by which they made their selection. Their overarching belief is that ‘prose poetry is able to be distinguished from the more general category of poetic prose, at least in broad terms, because it is pithier and more condensed’ (such a definition would discount John Ashbery’s Three Poems, sure to raise an eyebrow). Furthermore, prose poems ‘are typically fragments, resisting closure and refusing to convey a complete story’. In particular, they emphasise ‘the evocative, and even the ambiguous’. Noel-Tod, in his Penguin anthology, opted for a broader catch-all definition: ‘a prose poem is a poem without line breaks’. Whichever way we choose to define it, there is general agreement that prose poetry defies easy categorisation, manifesting a literary resistance that Kevin Brophy has characterised as its ‘defiant formlessness’.

What immediately stands out about the anthology is the broad cross-section of poets who have tried their hand at the form. If not quite a who’s who of contemporary Australian poetry, it is not far off. By comparison with Europe and other parts of the world, Australia proved slow off the mark, our earliest prose poems not appearing until roughly a century after Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (1869). Chris Wallace-Crabbe included a suite of five prose poems in his book Where the Wind Came (1971), conceivably the first local poet to consciously engage with the form. Full-length books followed: Rudi Krausmann’s From Another Shore (1975) and Andrew Taylor’s Parabolas (1976). Other early adopters featured in the Anthology, were Pam Brown, joanne burns, Gary Catalano, Anna Couani, Rodney Hall, David Malouf, Judith Rodriguez, Vicki Viidikas, and Ania Walwicz.

The twenty-first century has seen a rapid rise in the number of Australian prose poems being published, with a noticeable acceleration over the past five years. How to account for this rash of activity? The editors speculate whether prose poetry, ‘with its blurring of established boundaries’, is a form particularly suited to a nation ‘still in the process of finding ways to articulate an identity that properly and sufficiently acknowledges its traditional past and Indigenous dispossession, not to mention the complex, multicultural makeup of its population’. The inclusion of First Nations poets such as Judith Nangala Crispin, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Samuel Wagan Watson, alongside a range of culturally diverse voices, encourages the reader to engage with this proposition.

The Anthology highlights the heterogeneous practices adopted by Australian poets. Robert Adamson’s ‘Empty Your Eyes’, with its echoes of Pierre Reverdy, unspools in crystalline prose, dense with incongruous imagery. Anna Couani’s ‘What a Man, What a Moon’ assumes the form of an incantatory recitation, shot through with humour. Jessica L. Wilkinson experimentally fuses the prose poem with the concrete poem. Poets like John Foulcher and Jill Jones evoke dream-like states, while others fix in place fleeting remembrances, as if fashioning a still life. Others like Lisa Gorton and Aden Rolfe offer up jewel-like miniatures, evocative and suggestive. In most cases, these poems fulfil the editors’ yardstick by persistently refusing closure.

As an organising principle, the editors have opted for a simple alphabetical arrangement, avoiding hierarchies. While this approach fails to convey the evolutionary trends that a chronological approach might have laid bare, it ensures that the emphasis is placed squarely on the poems themselves. The majority of poets are represented by a single poem, with a select few allocated a second. By way of useful background, the editors have provided brief biographies and a list of sources at the end of the volume.

The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, a welcome and long overdue publication, maps a field of poetic activity that has been categorised as ‘a genre with an oxymoron for a name’. It points to contemporary Australian prose poetry as being a vital and dynamic form, one to which younger and diverse voices are increasingly drawn. While much of the recent activity has flourished in literary journals such as Cordite and Rabbit, Atherton and Hetherington’s considered selection will go a long way towards placing it in the public eye.