'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’ (Duwell) onto the VCE Literature text list. I wonder what this says about poetry in Australia. Her poems are so good on one metric (studious, ‘clever’, instructive), and so bad, downright naughty, on another (stylistic and/or political ‘radicalness’).' (Introduction)
