ACT Poetry Prize
Judith Wright Award (for a book by an Australian poet)
Commended 2011
White, Petra. The Simplified World. |
(on order for Libraries ACT) |
SYNOPSIS
Like Petra White’s applauded first collection, her second begins and ends with a fable of the uncanny ordinary. Between is a cornucopia of odes: epistolary, philosophical, elegiac. These poems think through and honour the normal mysteries of fate.
Her world is large and contemporary, anchored by a young poet’s own memories. White inhabits her poems lightly, using personal experience with wit and without self-pleading. Some of this work shows the shadow of depression: not so much expressing moods as touching on how depression dwells, finding its register so it can speak.
A number of poems openly engage with notable depressives of literary history, but we don’t need those homages to realise that this poet is a very capacious reader. It is there in her music. Late Lowell and Bishop, along with Harwood, ghost the swift edge in her language. Beyond these, a large tradition of cadences and tropes is absorbed in her fluent free verse lines.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Petra White was born in Adelaide in 1975, and lives in Melbourne, where she works in a government department and is studying for a Master of Public Policy and Management. Her first book of poetry, The Incoming Tide, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Prize and the ACT Poetry Prize.