Book review: Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington eds (2020)

I bought this Melbourne University Press publication at one of the independent booksellers’ shops and can recommend it wholeheartedly. It’s an exciting and important book that deserves to be widely read and discussed. If you’re looking for material for a book club, try this paperback.

It offers quality – and diversity (though there are some common features in the works – this will be my subject in this review). The book is exciting because it ropes in widely-dispersed writers across a broad time range. Because certain themes dominate I wondered while reading if this is due to the poetry community being small and well-connected (among themselves) or if it’s due to the fact that similar themes are explored at the same time in other forms of Australian literature – for example, novels and short stories. This is something the editors didn’t address. 

They talk about a particular quality that Australian prose poetry has. They contrast it with similar work made by practitioners in the US and the UK, but content themselves by saying that it has its “own flavour and tone”. It “sounds different”, they add, hopefully, before delivering a quantity of competent-sounding prose about “blurring of established boundaries” – prose poetry … duh! – and “the kinds of experiences that are neither fully coherent nor entirely resolvable” – ie the work is not uniformly boring and is experimental.

Later in this review I’ll try to resolve the intent of the collective work. What Atherton and Hetherington write sounds impressive and seems to tick all the right boxes (alternative community, counterculture – which they explicitly mention in the next paragraph – and other such commonplaces of academic jargon) but, as for helping the reader situate him- or herself in the world of prose poetry, or even in the wider world of Australian literature: not much. Nevertheless, they’ve done good work in assembling all these pieces together for general consumption, pieces that otherwise would be restricted to a much smaller pool of readers, or would have been left unread in old issues of literary magazines bound in the stacks of university libraries.

Even after reading only about a third of the book, certain patterns began to emerge around physical place (topography, geography) and personal situation (relationships). I’ll talk more about these things later on in this review, but for the moment want to concentrate on one other interesting aspect of the book. This is that none of the poems are flagged by a date on the page where they appear for consumption, meaning that, if you want to locate an author in time – orienting him or her within the confines of your own, personal, geography of literature – you have to consult a section near the back of the book that contains author biographies. This procedure is far too clunky for any reader to tolerate, so what happens – since the poems are ordered in the book according to the alphabet, by the author’s surname – is that you must deal with each poem on its own merits. You must ignore the chronological element that is embodied in such events as writing and publication. This is destabilising but not overly problematic, as it brings the focus back to the poetry itself rather than – had the initial publication date been contained in a rubric printed alongside each poem – on the context of the times. A holistic approach must be applauded for it imbues the poetry with added gravitas, and sidesteps any attempt by the reader to neatly slot each poem into a taxonomy that might bind and constrain the literature. 

It’s liberating, as is the occasional appearance of the Australian landscape, for example in Louise Crisp’s ‘Remnants’, which is subtitled ‘Gippsland Red Gum Plains’. It’s not certain from evidence contained in the anthology where the fragment, headed ‘Yeerung Bush Reserve’, first appeared in print (nor when), but one of Crisp’s books was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Awards in 1995 and she published books in many subsequent years. She is still alive and lives in East Gippsland, Victoria where “her work focuses on specific regional environments”. Local fauna appears also in Michael Aiken’s ‘By the sea (retired)’ where there are butcherbirds, and in Stuart Barnes’ ‘Hamlet without the Prince / with two lines from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ (where the attribution is heavy as lead, and loaded with irony):

Vulnerable as forest red-tailed black cockatoos, you went south the day the stock market headed south.

This poem introduces the idea of America (“the stock market”) that I’ll come back to later in this review, but also the notion of topography (“south”). I can now point to Judith Bishop’s ‘Definition of a Place’ where the geographical specificity of the continent is again brought to the fore, this time once more with wildlife (ibis, swallows, “butterflies”) and Carolyn Abbs’ wonderful ‘Poet on a Train’ where you find a more generic “ruffled blackbird” – the bird is European – used as a metaphor. 

This sliding between known places and a wider locus of fascination – Australia as part of the world and finding itself within it – is also present in other poems. Strikingly, Anna Couani’s ‘Map of the World’ epitomised, for me, an interest in the spatial and geographical, which are expressed by many of the pieces included in the part of the book I read. Couani’s poem has strong erotic overtones and compares the landscape to the human body, with all the expected obvious particularities that such an exercise must contain. Michelle Cahill’s ‘Agape’ revisits this locus of meaning-creation, in a way that again privileges the importance in the Australian psyche of America. 

My tutor in anatomy was an American research student with a slit in his heart like a mailing box.

…

He changed his name to a hyphenated form and we spoke a different language now. It was winter on campus and fortunately I came to be taught in Latin by an eccentric Professor of Anatomy.

Again, a feminised embodiment of the human form, with erotic and political overtones. Holding onto the place trope, there’s Michael Brennan’s ‘Hyde Park’, and Peter Boyle’s ‘Missing Words’ (with place and the body intermingled):

I don’t know how many things there are in this world that have no name. The soft inner side of the elbow, webbed skin between fingers, a day that wanders out beyond the tidal limits and no longer knows how to summon the moon it has lost …

The body and geography also come together again in Melissa Curan’s ‘this is the long drowning’ (“We are water (your skin becoming mine)”), and in Susan Fealy’s ‘Writing with the Left Hand’:

Moles channel under my skin – if they break the surface, what then? A rash. A plague. Hands could atrophy waiting for that mute continent, then a morbidity of doctors! I could be bandaged as a mummy, inside a polished tree! And what hands can understand inside such white, such practised bindings? What rhythm invokes restriction? What timbre its keynote? Yes, best to cut one off. Right is the left hand. Now is the left hand and blood on the table. Red on white holds no shadow. I will use the ink from my dead hand.

In Shastra Deo’s ‘light’ and Tricia Dearborn’s ‘The pouch of Douglas’ the body is centre-stage and performing a satirical and melancholy role. Medical and geographical themes merge once more in Vincent Buckley’s ‘Pen-Sickness’:

Pen-sickness: when you remember the poem waiting, perhaps liquid and infinitely yielding to each touch, or leaning back, resistant, towards its original spare shape, or dense and featureless as ice: then every gesture the world has made in it, every evening perception, every sip of speech, every word, comes back as bile, running precipitate into the throat hot as gruel from the long canals of the belly …

Peter Boyle’s ‘Some Mountains’ emphasises the extreme age of the land, and becomes distinctively Australian by association with Aboriginal culture (not explicitly mentioned in the poem):

The mountain beyond that pass has no name. It is too old for us to name it.

A spatial concern appears in the word “measure” in Quinn Eades’ ‘What grows’, in Laurie Duggan’s ‘Melancholia,’ (here with the medical faculty of society embedded in the world “laboratory”), in Michael Dransfield’s ‘Chaconne for a solipsist’ (“Robinson Crusoe on the wrong island”), and in Judith Nangala Crispin’s ‘On finding Charlotte in the Anthropological  record’:

We meet on the surface of a photograph, as a fish and bird might meet in a lake, at a point of sky and the water’s plane

In Gary Catalano’s ‘Pastoral (for Helen)’ the landscape once again features strongly, situated, in a decisive manner, at the centre of the poem. There is also the idea of domesticity. Judith Beveridge turns our frame of reference through 90 degrees in ‘My Name’, which puts the self at the centre of the square (“Someone is prowling around the borders of my name.”). In Fealy’s poem, there’s the hint of an American accent, too, nestled there in the word “timbre” (like the editors’ suggestion that Australian prose poetry “sounds” different from American or British work of the same type).

John Forbes’ ‘Tranteresque’ posits the Australian as foreign (“those big cans of Fosters you don’t get at home”) and highlights the allure of overseas that I’ve already pointed to above, especially the American and European. This particular theme is reprised in Michael Farrell’s ‘the snow depardieu’, here with an ironic frisson verging on applause: the French as the epitome of cool and sophistication. As also in Javant Biarujia’s ‘Icarus (from Virilities)’ (“a fort above Grenoble”, “Mont Blanc”). Adam Aitken’s ‘Lines from The Lover’ links a European precedent (the novel by Marguerite Duras) with southeast Asia (“a ferry crossing the Mekong say”) in a way that underscores the importance of place which I have flagged in many poems, in what appears above. Alternately, as in Kevin Brophy’s ‘When Death Comes (after Mary Oliver)’, the focus of the poet’s gaze is American (the poet in this poem’s title died this year).

Bruce Dawe turns the tables on this in ‘A Flexible Approach’, which remorselessly lambastes the visual and narratological culture of US TV, as it is relayed into Australian homes on the evening news on all the commercial channels and on the ABC (the national broadcaster), as well as SBS (a multicultural broadcaster subsidised by the federal government). A flicker of adulation reappears in M.T.C. Cronin’s ‘Yo-Yo Pietà’, in Jen Crawford’s ‘Ma Mere L’Oye’, and with Julie Chevalier the American ugliness appears in ‘a used band-aid stuck to the august 13, 1955 saturday evening post’.

The self-reflexive instinct that Beveridge’s poem brought to our attention returns in Luke Beesley’s ‘Audible’, here borrowing ideas from the television technology (and once more medical elements appear in the written landscape):

The camera panned up away from our conversation and fixed on a cloud artfully just fitting in the frame. It smouldered. The camera must have been mooring slowly following the cloud because the cheek of skyscraper sliced the cloud for a moment.

Abbs’ poem, mentioned earlier in this review, is about a woman seen on a train, and it’s not clear if the poet of the title is the narrator or the subject who, sitting there, is described in fulsome terms that veer off into the imaginative. The self and the Other mix and mingle in this poem, making it unclear where the objective ends and the subjective begins. This is delightful.

I also wanted to commend Kate Fagan for ‘Book of Hours for Narrative Lovers’, which again has that wry self-reflexive cast, Nathan Curnow’s ‘Dead Penguins’ (once more wildlife appears), and especially joanne burns’ amazing ‘the first few lines  a synopsis’, which is full of vibrant imagery as well as technology (“silicon chip”, “silk screen”, rotating fan”, “heater”, “magnifying glass”). The tendency to quote (in titles, subtitles, or in the poems themselves) is also reflective of this self-reflexiveness. All of the technology burns lists in her poem are in origin essentially foreign (American and European), and to contemplate this aspect of her poem serves to bring our attention back to the hybrid place/medicine concept used in so many of the poems in this collection. 

I haven’t gone into much detail in my review, preferring to point, in the absence of more space, to general trends. I have shown what the poets are writing about but not, in most cases, how. To go into more detail – though I describe below my reactions to some of the individual poems – would also require a lot more time. But I was able to see that the practitioners are struggling to come up with words to describe a native experience in the context of dominant global cultural hegemonies (which, IRL, is underpinned by a rapacious entertainment industry mostly generating mediocre and predictable fare for popular consumption, unlike the poetry in this book). 

If there is a distinctive Australian voice in this collection it has to work hard to be heard, and often the way that it is expressed is through recourse to the land or to nature. Beyond such elements it’s hard for me to go, although I read a collection of prose poetry last year that takes a broader view. At that time, I was unable to narrow my focus to individual themes, as I have done in the review you are currently reading. Even though I’ve given a very superficial survey of the poems I read in the ‘Anthology of Australian prose Poetry’ it was clearer this time what the individuals were trying to do. And while the earlier review spent more time talking about styles and movements, my attention with the ‘Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry’ is on more concrete things, ideas that have more currency and that can be used for other reasons. 

This is a limiting constraint but in a quick review it’s a necessary one if you’re going to cover a wide-enough sample of the offered poems. To a degree the practitioners sampled here seem to be deracinated and also cut off from their lyric heritage by an impulse that is evident in the editors’ introduction. They point to an early practitioner named Maymie Ada Hamlyn-Harris, who published a book in 1941 that they characterise as being “abstract and in a high Romantic mode”. But it might be in the lyrical formalism of the bush poets of the past that the real roots of this new crop of prose poets can be found, rather than the avant-garde of European and American high Modernism. While American influence is enticing it is also a source of shame (due to the idea of cultural dominance), and a similar – though not the same – effect characterises relations with European culture, which is heavier on the gravitas but also seen as foreign. 

Typical of the poets’ approach to middle Australia is Anna Couani’s ‘what a man, what a woman’, with its depressing repetitions and down-home commonplaces. It expresses a hatred of the ordinary (a common form of self-loathing of young Australian aesthetes).

Other poems endeavour to situate their ideas in a more productive sense of normal. In Anne Elvey’s ‘Treasure Hunt’, a horse appears on the moor with a rider on its back. There’s a horse also in Jennifer Compton’s ‘Very Shadows’, this time not removed from the present within the bounds of nostalgia, but rooted in the narrator’s imagination, a positive emblem of self. 

The horse is not the foreign object. Something else is – something I identified in works by the poets encompassed by this review; Australian practitioners sundered from their roots. Something different and also similar is visible in Fred Williams’ ecstatic canvases of the 1960s, an amalgam of abstract and Romantic, a pared-down, sublime snapshot of the intoxicatingly beautiful Australian bush. In this anthology are signs of a dominant urban subculture apparently united, with the editors – poets themselves –, in not so much rejecting as reformulating the bucolic enthusiasms of their urban ancestors. 

It would be unnecessarily reductive to posit, as I might be tempted to do if I were keen to shut down possibly productive avenues of enquiry, that the verse contained in this collection represents a puritanical distrust of them, or represent those of a rebel puritan adopting the manners and interests of a type of person she inherently despises without being able to admit as much. Similarly, it’s reductive of the editors to denigrate Hamlyn-Harris’ impulse to rework old forms, forms that have acquired gravitas – but that the promoters of a limited Modernism tell us to mock – over time. 

Things change over time but apparently the editors are as concerned with nationalism as the bush poets of 100 years ago. It is, to be sure, a powerful engine of enterprise and endeavour, as the title of this book attests. What are they looking for? Where do they turn to find it? Did the publisher bend their natural instincts to the fulfilment of prosaic purposes or is nationalism in the context of poetry important? Is it important for a culture to understand itself? How does one do such a thing? In order to understand, must you set yourself apart? This seems like a reassuringly Romantic approach to culture’s meaning, and not at all Modernist, nor universal. 

Just as not all that’s in this book is of equal quality, there are different approaches to the many shared themes and issues it carries, and while the editors don’t demonstrate in their introduction how the tropes and concerns of the poets included in the ‘Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry’ are disseminated throughout the broader culture, it’s probably through pop music and the theatre and, hence, TV shows, TV and radio ads, and movies. 

While I’ve restricted myself to the poets whose names begin with the letters A to F, you can see also how much wonderful material is in only the first part of the book. And I haven’t even mentioned poems dealing with relationships:

• Pam Brown, ‘It’s Light’, ‘Pictures’
• Kevin Brophy, ‘Dog on the Road’
• Cassandra Atherton, ‘Bonds’
• Jordie Albiston, ‘[anon]’
• Robert Adamson, ‘Empty Your Eyes (after Pierre Reverdy)’
• John Foulcher, ‘Before the Storm’
• Ali Cobby Eckermann, ‘Intervention Payback’

Based on their concerns and thematic material, the poets in this collection form a recognisable group. Similarly, relationships are a source of inspiration for enterprise. From a parent seen in old age, to a child playing on the beach, from feelings of love for another, to feelings of disgust at the self, a variety of relationships is canvassed.

The last poem listed above is an amazing example of the power of the familiar, taking the reader inside a remote Aboriginal community in the most engaging way concievable. I felt attached to people I have never met and probably never will, and able to grasp concepts and realities far outside my personal orbit. 

Better than other forms of expressive art, this is what poetry is able to do. The immediacy, what the editors, quoting poet John Taylor, label “an electric shock” (and what a friend of mine labelled a “flame”). That difficult-to-describe spark that flares at the end of the appropriate poetic line and that, in the examples included in this book, struggles with the more “prosaic” nature of prose. The result is deeply attractive and interesting.