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A review by aceface
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson by Jeremy Noel-Tod
4.0
My main attraction to this book was the form of the prose poem itself. I'd been shown a few and come across some in the past, but I felt like I needed to come to grips with what they are and how they work when they're working best. This book was definitely a help in that search.
The introduction doesn't give any clear definitions, but I think that was helpful in some respects - it just gave me the push to get into it, read through them and find my own definition.
The simplest definition of a prose poem I can find is 'a poem where there are no line breaks or stanzas - paragraphs take their place.' When coming across one of the poems in this book that was really working, its layout and form seemed incidental; they took the backseat while the language did the work.
There were definitely some poems in here that were tough to get through. Some were boring, monotonous, totally uninspiring (some missing the mark of the poetic so far that they made it into the territory of 'bad prose') but I don't mind that, since they were outshined by some true gems. I feel like that's the case with any anthology, and you just have to move through and find what works best for you in that moment.
Some of my favourites were -
'The End of Days' by Golan Haji
'The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter' by Mark Strand
'Kuchh Vakya' by Udayan Vajpeyi
'Hammer and Nail' by Naomi Shihab Nye
'The Dogs' by Yves Bonnefoy
'Cloistered' by Seamus Heaney
'it' by Inger Christensen
'Clock' by Pierre Riverdy
'Around the Star's Throne' by Hans Arp
'The Pleasures of the Door' by Francis Ponge
'In Praise of Glass' by Gabriela Mistral
'Winter Night' by Georg Trakl
and
'From the Waters of Babylon' by Emma Lazarus
I'd also highly recommend the Rimbaud, Turgenev, Baudelaire and Bertrand selections that close the book.
(I found it funny that most of my favourites were translations. I'll definitely be checking out some of those authors.)
All in all, I feel that this is a good book on the whole. There's plenty that I don't love in it, which is OK, but there are some real treasures in here that truly make up for it.
The introduction doesn't give any clear definitions, but I think that was helpful in some respects - it just gave me the push to get into it, read through them and find my own definition.
The simplest definition of a prose poem I can find is 'a poem where there are no line breaks or stanzas - paragraphs take their place.' When coming across one of the poems in this book that was really working, its layout and form seemed incidental; they took the backseat while the language did the work.
There were definitely some poems in here that were tough to get through. Some were boring, monotonous, totally uninspiring (some missing the mark of the poetic so far that they made it into the territory of 'bad prose') but I don't mind that, since they were outshined by some true gems. I feel like that's the case with any anthology, and you just have to move through and find what works best for you in that moment.
Some of my favourites were -
'The End of Days' by Golan Haji
'The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter' by Mark Strand
'Kuchh Vakya' by Udayan Vajpeyi
'Hammer and Nail' by Naomi Shihab Nye
'The Dogs' by Yves Bonnefoy
'Cloistered' by Seamus Heaney
'it' by Inger Christensen
'Clock' by Pierre Riverdy
'Around the Star's Throne' by Hans Arp
'The Pleasures of the Door' by Francis Ponge
'In Praise of Glass' by Gabriela Mistral
'Winter Night' by Georg Trakl
and
'From the Waters of Babylon' by Emma Lazarus
I'd also highly recommend the Rimbaud, Turgenev, Baudelaire and Bertrand selections that close the book.
(I found it funny that most of my favourites were translations. I'll definitely be checking out some of those authors.)
All in all, I feel that this is a good book on the whole. There's plenty that I don't love in it, which is OK, but there are some real treasures in here that truly make up for it.