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.

Responding to the fragile borders between climate change and mental health to evolve into conversations around trauma, change, care and the natural world, The Chalk Butterfly explores images of home and the paradoxes around our simultaneous care and un-care for nature and language. Working backwards through the butterfly's life cycle, each phase examines the tipping points, vanishing or fractured boundaries between our environments (internal and external), reflecting on the damaging ways we step on both the earth and humanity. Yet in these precise, exquisitely realised prose poems there is also celebration of the overwhelming urge to adapt and help life thrive, a turning away from the despair that would accept we might 'just about manage' or even fail in favour of moments of transformation.

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.

Celebrating an increasingly interesting form that concentrates short prose pieces with the techniques of poetry brought to bear, this is the first anthology of its kind in the UK and features well known proponents of the prose poetry form such as George Szirtes and Pascale Petit, as well as emerging voices. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru