Published 2024. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619142 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Petra White is a singular voice in Australian poetry. She is known for a style that doesn’t fit neatly into any of its categories, a free-verse of startling energy and surprise. That Galloping Horse
is her sixth collection, and the first to introduce her to UK readers. Written at first in Melbourne and then while resident in London, Berlin and Belfast between 2017 and 2023, these poems are haunted by places, but they also reach into the spiritual and the imaginary. Thirteen elegies take personal grief as their starting point and travel widely, mediating anguish through delight in language and the physical world. Rich in their variety and tones, these elegies are inhabited by the Ukraine War, the nature of modern work, domestic life in the reality of planetary demise, marriage and familial love. Alongside them, short mysterious lyrics build layers of irony and raw narratives traverse the Nullarbor Highway and the atomic cloud of Maralinga.
Comments on previous works by Petra White:
"This is a very accomplished and very complex first book by a poet who can be said to be, already, of considerable importance.: — Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review on
The Incoming Tide
"In The Simplified World Petra White more than fulfils the promise made by her first book, The Incoming Tide , back in 2007. For all of her literary sophistication and verbal ingenuity, White is a poet of the world as we know it, an observer of poignant situations – and a conveyor of them." —Geoff Page, The Canberra Times
"This poem concludes: ‘Something makes them surge.’ That same ‘Something’ makes this entire collection surge; these poems are lit up and muse-inspired, mini Ezekiels all in the face of baffling Gods." —Ivy Ireland, Cordite , on Reading for a Quiet Morning
"'How the Temple was Built' is not an easy poem to describe. Suffice to say that it has something in common with Arthur Boyd’s biblical paintings and, arguably, with Ted Hughes’s book-length poem Crow … it is satisfyingly physical and metaphysical at the same time." —Geoff Page, The Australian on Reading for a Quiet Morning
"Petra White's 'Ode on the End' is hectically imperilled — 'He gives/you the necks of your enemies/(fear must have foes)./He draws up a battle/where perhaps there was only a soul'. Her work is often Rilkean internal interrogation, with emphatic alliteration, but there are also finely executed portraits such as Older Sister — 'chore-hungry and chore-fed … Her fingers fly, her eyes are stone'. —Gig Ryan, The Sydney Morning Herald , on Thirty Australian Poets
"‘Mother on Men’ is a wonderful poem—I suspect it could become something of a classic." —Martin Langford, Meanjin , on Cities
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