British Prose Poetry

This book is the first collection of essays on the British prose poem. With essays by leading academics, critics and practitioners, the book traces the British prose poem-s unsettled history and reception in the UK as well as its recent popularity. The essays cover the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries exploring why this form is particularly suited to the modern age and yet can still be problematic for publishers, booksellers and scholars. Refreshing perspectives are given on the Romantics, Modernists and Post-Modernists, among them Woolf, Beckett and Eliot as well as more recent poets like Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Claudia Rankine, Jeremy Over and Vahni Capildeo. British Prose Poetry moves from a contextual overview of the genre-s early volatile and fluctuating status, through to crucial examples of prose poetry written by established Modernist, surrealist and contemporary writers. Key questions around boundaries are discussed more generally in terms of race, class and gender. The British prose poem-s international heritage, influences and influence are explored throughout as an intrinsic part of its current renaissance.

Jane Monsonis a Mentor at the University of Cambridge, UK. She was previously Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the editor of This Line is not for Turning (2011), an anthology of contemporary British prose poetry. Her poetry collections include Speaking Without Tongues (2010) and The Shared Surface (2013). 

Introduction, Jane Monson.- The British Prose Poem and "Poetry" in Early Modernism, Margueritte S. Murphy.- Hidden Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry, David Caddy.- The Flourishing of the Prose Poem in America and Britain, Robert Vas Dias.- The Marvellous Clouds: Reflections on the Prose Poetry of Woolf, Baudelaire and Williams, Michael O'Neill.- "I grow more & more poetic": Virginia Woolf and prose poetry, Jane Goldman.- Joyce and the Prose Poem, Michel Delville.- T.S. Eliot's prose (poetry), Vidyan Ravinthiran.- "I went disguised in it": re-evaluating the prose poetry, and prose poetic legacy, of Seamus Heaney, Andy Brown.- Mark Ford's Prose Poetry as Epistle, Anthony Caleshu.- Questioning the Prose Poem: Thoughts on Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, Alan Wall.- "Between Two Rooms": Vahni Capildeo's Prose Poetry, Jeremy Noel-Tod.- "I cam in crepusculo to the Hay": Subjectivity, Language and Place in Three Contemporary Prose Poems, Jeff Hilson.- The Successful Prose Poem Leaves Behind its Name, Owen Bullock.- Man and Nature In and Out of Order: the surrealist prose poetry of David Gascoyne, Luke Kennard.- Nonsense and Wonder: An Exploration of the Prose Poems of Jeremy Over, Ian Seed.- Prose Poetry and the Spirit of Jazz, Nikki Santilli.- Roy Fisher's Five Musicians, Peter Robinson.- The Pedagogy of the Prose Poem, Patricia Debney.- Life, Death and the Prose Poem:  The Author's Narrative, Michael Rosen.