Shearsman Books, 2024
Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit.
In Petra White’s latest collection, shortlisted in August this year for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection in the Queensland Literary Awards, the poet contemplates the complexities of midlife —marriage, motherhood and encroaching mortality —in 39 thought-provoking new poems.
Journal poems, elegies and short, powerful lyric fragments overlap in thematic approach in this vibrant collection. White explores her familial past, the loss of loved ones and the omnipresence of death— the entire work interrogating adjustments to ageing and the state of the world.
White was living in Europe with her husband and daughter as these poems were written, and the poems swing between bleak beauty and grittiness in their depiction of the tough middle years of a life stinging with internal sharpness. In ‘Somerset,’ [40] the poem’s narrator asks
What have we wandered into with our sturdy forty-year old legs?
ending the poem with the lines
… We follow each other
up steep hills, almost make it to pure emptiness,
but there it is surfacing at the pub, that stubborn story.
The realities of work “batter” the poet and her partner in poems such as ‘Midlife’ where White alludes to the “light dust of marriage” where
…Plain, the language of love,
that knows it must make room for life – or is life,
basic, hurried, some characters on your phone,
your tired hand, reaching mine across the table [14]
Again, in ‘Elegy (7)’ we encounter
… work, that galloping horse we ride bareback
clinging to its mane with reddening hands —
it settles on the dinner table,
almost apologetic but grinning [62]
The horse – here, a metaphor for work — is one of a number of motifs that appear in the collection, another being angels that are not always the good portents of protection that, as readers, we might expect.
In the opening poem in the collection, a “terrifiying” angel appears as the poem’s narrator travels through Chicago where,
in the space between home and state
the angel shudders, turns, cramped wings shake open —
…
through the silver sorrows of the city,
its lumpy cracked streets, its America, soaring in the snow.
Angels appear elsewhere including in ‘Parents’ [15], a poem that alludes to the birth of the poet’s daughter:
… in the far distance are the sunlit seconds
where we will vanish, or reappear as helpful ghosts,
determined to feed her, make her laugh, our shadow hands
holding hers, fast as the angel in the womb did hold her
until she could be born …
Joys and challenges of motherhood are explored in minimal works such as ‘My Daughter in the Park’ [13] that addresses the temporary loss of the poet’s child out of sight beyond a hill —every parent’s greatest fear—and relief at her daughter’s reappearance:
… on the crest, waving:
Time shrank again into my hand.
Many of these poems are written in the desolate Covid-19 years where confinement, weather and the restrictions and responsibilities of parenthood snowball in expressions of time and temperament.
Depression is at the core of this collection and a sense of separation and dislocation both from Australia and from the dead who know nothing of the poet’s new life or child.
White’s series of journal poems, midway through the book, catapult us back to Melbourne where the poet is imagining a winter of Covid-induced isolation where “the city is boarded up / airports closed / to citizens” [20] or in other places, Adelaide and the poet’s childhood. In ‘Journal in May, Berlin 2021,’[22] childhood is
… a lantern swung in the midst of fire.
Bare feet burning on South Australian summer grass.
The empty block on the quiet avenue,
eternal voices calling us to dinner.
In ‘Chorus’ [29], structured in numbered sections over six pages, White takes us on a car journey with death, disguised as a hitchhiker. In this dream sequence, the poem’s narrator
…drove and drove
and never ran out of fuel.
finally stopping at a roadside diner where, after eating, death addresses her with the questions
What if I offered to take you off your own hands now?
What would you say?
At the end of this conversation, death “vanishe[s], leaving me with the long haul of life.” [34]
Mythological poems such as ‘Leda’ [37] and ‘Daphne’ [37-38] explore the issue of mortality versus immortality while the series of 13 elegiac poems that complete the collection allow both reflections about, and discussion with, those who have passed on. In ‘Elegy (1)’, for example,
We still talk to the dead as if we could not exist to them
…
What great ship in the night brings them goods that keep them alive? [54]
In this poem, and others in the sequence, White returns to the “Long quiet streets in Adelaide” that would now be “foreign to the dead” — where a ghost can be found “among the cabbage moths in the yellow field where once the house stood.” These are poems not only mourning the people of her past but places that held unquiet family histories fragmented through the poems.
There is a beautiful, cool precision to this collection. A standout poem for me is ‘Honeymoon’ [16] —a poem that navigates a child’s problematic relationship with her stepfather or “the step-storm of a father in the world of a daughter,” with the end of the poem especially affecting:
Tiptoe of knowledge, his voice in my head,
read the dictionary, if you want to know, and I did and there were words
like stepladders ascending to a heaven …
… In the classroom I watched
clouds crossing the sky while maths, intricate as love,
remained unsolved in its tiny blue squares.