'This volume opens with a full-length book of new poems by Petra White, A Hunger. Bound-in with it are her two prior books, The Simplified World and The Incoming Tide. The new poems of A Hunger are as lucid as they are mysterious: crafted for the ear, and for an emotional tone that can slip delicately between the mischievously ironic and a cut-through bleakness or joy. A strong theme at times is depression. As a poet she presses there beyond recording something personal into examining darkness itself, in a fierce art that deliberately gives and asks for no indulgence. The same goes for her love poems, in a sequence that plunges into the wild contradictions and poignancy of new love, with some glances to the Renaissance poets. White's poems inhabit life's essential fragility with a light-footed steadfastness. Her well-known 'Southbank', from her first book, is given a further turn in a new sequence, 'The Sound of Work': Petra White is one of the few contemporary poets to write convincingly about work in an office - indeed work in general. In adding her prior two books to this volume, the Press intends not only to keep them in print, but to lay out for readers the fullness of the growth of an oeuvre. She, the poet, has taken the opportunity to make a handful of excisions and revisions.' (Publication summary)
'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.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Those who have not yet discovered this contemporary Australian poet will be delighted by her haunting and luminous reflections.'
'Those who have not yet discovered this contemporary Australian poet will be delighted by her haunting and luminous reflections.'
