Australian prose poetry has finally come into its own in the 21st century, with recent volumes by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle and Shady Cosgrove marking significant additions to the tradition. After a slow start compared to 19th-century French poets like Aloysius Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud, Australian poets have embraced the form, which departs from free verse by using sentences and paragraphs instead of lineation and stanzas.
Historical Context and Development
Prose poetry faced suspicion in Anglophone countries throughout the 20th century. As poet and critic David Wheatley noted in 2019, The Oxford Book of English Verse contained no prose poems, reflecting a longstanding rivalry between French and British literary cultures. American poets were quicker to adopt the form, with important volumes like Mark Strand's The Monument (1978) and Charles Simic's Pulitzer Prize-winning The World Doesn't End (1989). In Australia, early prose poetry volumes appeared in the mid-1970s, including Rudi Krausmann's From Another Shore (1975) and Andrew Taylor's Parabolas (1976). The form gained traction from the 1980s onward with works by Vicki Viidikas, Gary Catalano, Joanne Burns, and Ania Walwicz, leading to the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020).
New Collections: Hybrid Forms and Domestic Themes
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, a New Zealand-born poet living in Melbourne, has published two volumes: Autobiography of a Marguerite and Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama. Shady Cosgrove, based in the Illawarra, released Flight. These collections use hybrid forms to explore disaffection, fractured identities, and illness, often tied to domestic environments. Homesickness is nuanced and uncanny; narrators yearn for home while being sickened by it. In Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama, Butcher-McGunnigle begins with home as a photographic negative where “snow is black, teeth are black, the place where she was born.” In Autobiography of a Marguerite, she recalls spending “a lot of time at the sick bay at school, waiting for my mother to arrive.” Cosgrove's poem “Reckoning” from Flight states: “It’s a struggle for footing – powder, ice, and beneath that: home.” Another poem set during COVID lockdown reads: “I’ve worn through three pairs of shoes walking the 5km perimeter of what is possible.” The prose poem's fully justified block of text becomes claustrophobic, reflecting restrictions on movement.
Autobiography of a Marguerite: Fragmented Narratives and Illness
Although newly published in Australia, Butcher-McGunnigle's work is over a decade old. Autobiography of a Marguerite first appeared in 2014 from New Zealand's Hue & Cry Press, while Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama contains poems from 2011. “In a way it feels like a posthumous publication,” Butcher-McGunnigle has said. The book is a series of ruminations on troubled family relations and illness, presented as a long fractured sequence. The poet's mother is named Marguerite, but other Marguerites haunt the book, including writers Marguerite Duras and Marguerite Yourcenar, and possibly Renaissance poet Marguerite de Navarre. The volume opens with a coloured photograph of a baby in a cot and an accompanying prose poem epigraph. “It is not even a story,” the book begins. Butcher-McGunnigle eschews conventional linear narrative, focusing on interlacings of language and wordplay to convey the constraining nature of chronic illness and family dysfunction. “The happening is still happening,” the final poem states, resisting closure. The poet aligns with avant-garde L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets like Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman. The first half includes sentence fragments and missing words as long underscored spaces, reminiscent of Rosmarie Waldrop's “gap gardening.” The second section breaks the prose poem into small groups of sentences and footnotes described as “found poems,” drawn from Duras and Yourcenar, leading to vertical reading. At the end, prose poems are paired with family snapshots, creating tension between text and image. “Everything is a painting if you look long enough,” Butcher-McGunnigle writes.
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama: Opacity and Metaphor
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama can be read as a late-published preface to Autobiography of a Marguerite. Its poems are more opaque but share themes: “already she has begun to prepare for the tasks of disease and dependency,” Butcher-McGunnigle writes. Metaphors take on a life of their own: “A group of chairs structured around a bruise, even plus even is even, odd plus odd is even. Even though we do not mean to, we continue to feed the fish in the bruised pond.” The bruise ramifies into the wider world, connecting visual appearance to personal damage. Despite angst, most poems have a matter-of-fact tone and convey comedy and absurdity through wordplay. “A lifetime of sentences which at first glance seem superfluous, but whose value is later understood. One thing leads to a mother. Soon enough, a flock of children came running and tapped on the glass. When I reached the bottom of the stares, I looked up.”
Flight: Neo-Surrealism and Feminist Critique
Shady Cosgrove's Flight begins with COVID and ends with the idea of living multiple simultaneous lives. The collection focuses on intense subjectivities, domestic surrealities, and quotidian experiences. Language is closely implicated, as in “Your Poem is a Plane Flight”: “One stanza, less than a page, and I’m running through the terminal, boarding slip and passport ready.” In “Round Trip,” a protagonist takes a lonely flight back to her departure airport and finds everyone at home still sleeping, suggesting imaginative transport over conventional reality. This book is about crossing imaginative thresholds. Cosgrove employs metaphor in unexpected ways: “you skip stones across the lake of my chest”; “There’s a woman sitting in a rocking chair, gazing out of my left eye”; “His girlfriend lives underwater. He was hoping for a mermaid but squids aren’t bad.” Cosgrove develops her conceits systematically, connecting her to neo-surrealist American prose poets like Russell Edson, Charles Simic, James Tate, and Peter Johnson. However, her poems are pointed feminist exposés of domesticity, functioning as “pressure cookers” where the quotidian is parodied. This aligns with Holly Iglesias's Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (2004), which argues that “women articulate the constraints of gender in prose poems, battling against confinement, boxing inside the box.” In “Domesticity,” the poet is on a treadmill of endless washing: “My Samsung front loader is a hamster wheel. I climb inside, running and running. But even so, the laundry is never finished.” In “Sanctuary,” a refrigerator is anthropomorphised: “The fridge followed her home and sat on the doorstep. ... Her husband said it would have to go or be put to use.” The poem ends with a proliferation of appliances: “she woke one morning, neck sore. A blender and vacuum cleaner had appeared, propped against the fridge. And beyond, the lawn was packed with dryers and deep freezers, ovens and dishwashers, all of them perched like giant metal birds.”
Conclusion: Prose Poetry as Container
Prose poetry is an excellent form for exploring grief, illness, and domestic constraints because its block of text functions as a container, holding emotions in a cramped space that threatens to explode. These three collections are notable additions to the burgeoning Australian prose poetry scene, refreshing old conventions with innovative works.
