Australian prose poetry has finally come into its own in the 21st century, with recent collections by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle and Shady Cosgrove marking significant additions to the tradition. These works use hybrid forms to explore disaffection, fractured identities, and illness, often set against domestic environments and the concept of home.
Historical Context of Prose Poetry in Australia
Prose poetry had a slow start in Australia, long after 19th-century French poets like Aloysius Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud wrote groundbreaking works such as Gaspard de la nuit (1842), Le Spleen de Paris (1869), and Illuminations (1886). Australian poets remained suspicious of the form, which departs from free verse by using sentences and paragraphs instead of lineation and stanzas. This suspicion permeated 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, as if the longstanding rivalry between French and British literary traditions continued in poetry.
American and Early Australian Prose Poetry
American poets were quicker to embrace prose poetry as a significant literary mode, 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, books composed mainly of prose poetry appeared as early as the mid-1970s, including Rudi Krausmann's From Another Shore (1975) and Andrew Taylor's Parabolas (1976). From the 1980s onwards, significant volumes by Vicki Viidikas, Gary Catalano, Joanne Burns, and Ania Walwicz enlivened the form, establishing a solid antipodean bedrock evident in the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020).
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle's Collections
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. Although newly published in Australia, these works are more than a decade old; Autobiography of a Marguerite was first published in 2014 by New Zealand's Hue & Cry Press, while Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama contains poems written in 2011. "In a way it feels like a posthumous publication," Butcher-McGunnigle has said.
Homesickness in these works is nuanced and uncanny; narrators yearn for, but are simultaneously sickened by, home. Butcher-McGunnigle begins Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama with the idea of home as a photographic negative, where "snow is black, teeth are black, the place where she was born." In Autobiography of a Marguerite, she says she "spent a lot of time at the sick bay at school, waiting for my mother to arrive."
Autobiography of a Marguerite
Autobiography of a Marguerite is a series of ruminations on troubled family relations and illness, presented as a long fractured sequence. Butcher-McGunnigle has revealed that her mother's name is Marguerite, but many other Marguerites haunt this book, including the student her mother was named after, writers Marguerite Duras and Marguerite Yourcenar, and possibly Renaissance poet Marguerite de Navarre. The book begins with the line "It is not even a story," and Butcher-McGunnigle eschews conventional linear narrative, focusing instead on interlacings of language and wordplay. This creates a sense of the constraining nature of chronic illness and family dysfunction. "The happening is still happening," the final poem states, emphasizing that closure is not the poet's aim.
The first half includes many sentence fragments and missing words, appearing as long underscored spaces, reminiscent of poet Rosmarie Waldrop's use of "gap gardening." The second section breaks the prose poem apart into small groups of sentences and footnotes described as "found poems," drawn from works by Duras and Yourcenar, leading the reader into vertical rather than horizontal reading. At the end, prose poems are paired with photographs that look like family snapshots, but the texts and images are in constant tension. "Everything is a painting if you look long enough," writes Butcher-McGunnigle.
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama can be read as a late-published preface to Autobiography of a Marguerite. Its poems were written earlier and are more opaque, but their themes are closely related: "already she has begun to prepare for the tasks of disease and dependency," Butcher-McGunnigle writes. Striking 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." Despite a sense of crisis and angst, most poems have a matter-of-fact tone and convey the comical and absurd, often through wordplay.
Shady Cosgrove's Flight
Shady Cosgrove, who lives in the Illawarra, published Flight with Gazebo Books. The collection begins with an experience of COVID and ends with the idea of flight, or living a number of simultaneous lives. It focuses on intense subjectivities, domestic surrealities, and quotidian experiences. In Your Poem is a Plane Flight, Cosgrove writes: "One stanza, less than a page, and I'm running through the terminal, boarding slip and passport ready." Flight is more often a metaphor than an actual event. In Round Trip, a protagonist takes a lonely flight that returns her to the airport she left from, and finds that in her house "everyone was still sleeping," suggesting imaginative transport is stronger than conventional reality.
Cosgrove employs metaphor in lively and unexpected ways, such as "you skip stones across the lake of my chest" and "There's a woman sitting in a rocking chair, gazing out of my left eye." In Mother(land), the narrator "woke early to write this morning and discovered zebras in the living room – they were chewing on the couch and scratching against the coffee table." This connects Cosgrove to neo-surrealist American prose poets like Russell Edson, Charles Simic, James Tate, and Peter Johnson.
Feminist Exposés of Domesticity
Cosgrove's prose poems are pointed feminist exposés of domesticity, functioning as "pressure cookers" where the quotidian is parodied. She shares preoccupations 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 an eternal treadmill of washing and drying: "My Samsung front loader is a hamster wheel. I climb inside, running and running. But even so, the laundry is never finished." In Sanctuary, she anthropomorphises a refrigerator: "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 ominous 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."
Prose poetry is an excellent form for exploring the constraints of grief, illness, the domestic, and the quotidian because its block of text functions as a kind of container, squeezing the text so it threatens to explode. As additions to an Australian poetic tradition, these three collections are notable contributions to the burgeoning Australian prose poetry scene.
