Petra White



Journal in March

Berlin, 2022 1 I write in haste, as if on the jut of the future, the thinly veiled present stands still all around, like a set of chessmen waiting to be knocked over. We move dumbly, slow tractors in a …

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Gareth Morgan Reviews Cities by Petra White

Petra White’s poetry has been highly and widely praised, celebrated for its seriousness, its engagement with poets like Petrarch, Dante, Coleridge and Donne, its ability to ‘recall’ these famous European names and their famous poems. She is presented as a serious poet, and has managed to get her ‘kind of Collected-poems-so-far’ onto the VCE Literature text list.

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Ivy Ireland Reviews Petra White and Magdalena Ball

Approaching new work from such sharp, prolific and often dazzling poets as Magdalena Ball and Petra White is arguably no job for a quiet morning. Both White’s Reading for a Quiet Morning and Ball’s Unmaking Atoms demand (and duly reward) close attention.

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Petra White Reviews Martin Harrison

Many years ago, as a young fruit-picker, I carried Martin Harrison’s The Kangaroo Farm around with me for a week. I was camping on the Murray in Cobram, and struck by Harrison’s vivid evocations of the landscapes like the one in which I was sleeping on rocks. His sense of light, the gristliness of things, the sounds, the movement of kingfishers. It was a world made up of particular details, of things attempted to be seen as they are, rather than being embroidered into any overarching narrative or self-proclaiming poetic. Harrison had a kind of honesty and closeness to things that I hadn’t yet seen in my early days of reading Australian poetry.

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Martin Duwell Reviews Petra White

Petra White’s A Hunger is a kind of Collected-Poems-so-far, containing her two previous books, The Incoming Tide and The Simplified World, and a new collection that provides the overall title. It is not a large body of work but it is an impressively consistent one and a third book is often a good place from which to get a grip on a poet’s overall orientations.

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Jacinta Le Plastrier Interviews Nicholas Walton-Healey

Image of and by Nicholas Walton-Healey Land Before Lines is a book from Melbourne-based photographer and writer Nicholas Walton-Healey. The 144-page, full-colour volume (the images appear in black and white here for page recall considerations) features portraits of 68 Victorian …

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Impian Tentang Kerja | A Dream of Work

Impian Tentang Kerja Tengkorak kita yang tersesat saling mengitari geloyor lapisan lemak dalam cahaya lampu kantor yang meredamkan cahaya. Kita di sini demi ada di sini, senantiasa siap sedia. Kerja yang membara keterdesakan yang tak begitu mendesak – suara-suara manusia …

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Heather Taylor Johnson Reviews Young Poets: An Australian Anthology

I’ve respected John Leonard Press since its beginnings in 2006, and over the years a theme has formed across its publications. Leonard’s poets have a lot in common. There is nothing slapdash about any of them. These are poets clearly enticed by language and by the theories of life. Don’t expect rhyming. Don’t expect clichés. And do not, above all, expect anything simple.”

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