Book review: ‘The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem’ by Jeremy Noel-Tod

As part of a not particularly concerted effort I’ve been making to get ‘into’ poetry, I thought an anthology of prose poetry might be right up my street.

In his introduction, editor Jeremy Noel-Tod defines the vague, oxymoronic term prose poem as ‘a poem without the line breaks’, going on to quote Coleridge’s distinction between prose and poetry: ‘prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in the best order’. From what I could gather, prose poetry is prose with poetic pretensions. Or simply prose that someone has decided to label ‘prose poetry’.

I can’t say I enjoyed this anthology. While it contained a fair number of pieces I took pleasure in (albeit simply as ‘nice prose’), the majority did nothing for me, with many striking me as needlessly obscurantist. I also did not agree with Noel-Tod’s entirely reasonable decision, for the sake of saving space, to include only fragments of numerous prose poems: if something is worth anthologising, it seems to me, it should be quoted in its entirety.

As I say, there is some nice prose in this anthology, but what made it enjoyable was the fact it was good prose, rather than good ‘prose poetry’ (whatever the term might mean).