Poetry

Baudelaire’s dream

Item: Collected Prose Poems
Author: Paul Hetherington

Gary Catalano’s distinguished prose poetry

by Paul Hetherington •

March 2022, no. 440

Collected Prose Poems by Gary Catalano

Life Before Man, $24.99 pb, 232 pp

Poetry

Baudelaire’s dream

Gary Catalano’s distinguished prose poetry

by Paul Hetherington •

March 2022, no. 440

The poetry community in Australia, as in the United Kingdom, has been slow to accept prose poetry as a legitimate poetic form. Yet there have been celebrated exponents of prose poetry over nearly two centuries – and even longer if the prose component of the Japanese Haibun, developed by Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), is understood as prose poetry.

Paul Hetherington

By this contributor

Paul Hetherington has published seventeen volumes of poetry and prose poetry and won or been nominated for more than forty national and international awards and competitions, recently winning the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. He co-wrote Prose Poetry: An introduction (Princeton, 2020), and co-edited Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020). He is Emeritus Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra.