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y separately published work icon The Simplified World selected work   poetry  
Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 The Simplified World
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Units Teaching this Work

Text Unit Name Institution Year
y separately published work icon The Simplified World Petra White , Melbourne : John Leonard Press , 2010 Z1690772 2010 selected work poetry (taught in 1 units)

'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.

Literary Studies: Poetry/Criticism University of Canberra 2011 (Semester 2)
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