Petra White

Last updated

Petra White
BornPetra White
Adelaide, South Australia
OccupationPoet, public servant
NationalityAustralian
Period2000–present
Notable awards Grace Leven Prize for Poetry

Petra White is an Australian poet. White was born in Adelaide in 1975, the eldest of six children, and now lives in Berlin with her husband and daughter. Her first published collection of poetry, The Incoming Tide (John Leonard Press 2007), was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and the ACT Poetry Prize.

Contents

In 2011, five of White's poems were selected for inclusion in the landmark anthology of Australian Poetry, Australian Poetry Since 1788. The poems selected are Ricketts Point, Voyage, Woman and Dog, Older Sister and Notes for the Time Being.

Biography

Petra White grew up in Adelaide. She studied English and German literature at the University of Melbourne, completing a BA with honours. In 2002 she studied at Essen University and travelled widely in Europe. In 2008 she was Fellow of Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, completing a five-week residency.

In 2012, White and Paul Hetherington took Australian poetry to Ireland with Australian Poetry Limited's first international tour. White conducted readings and workshops at many venues throughout the Republic and Northern Ireland including the Bealtaine Festival in Dublin, Laurel Villa in Magherafelt and Writers' Week at Listowel.

White's second collection, The Simplified World, published in 2010, was the joint winner of the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in the anthology Take Five (Shoestring Press 2008, UK), The Age, Melbourne, and other anthologies and periodicals.

A third major collection, A Hunger, was published by John Leonard Press in 2014. This publication includes White's previous collections, in which slight changes have been made to a small number of poems.

In May 2017, White's fourth collection, Reading for a Quiet Morning, was published by GloriaSMH Press. It features a 'compact epic' inspired by the biblical story of Ezekiel, but with a distinctly twenty-first century, feminist perspective.

White was a founding co-editor of the So Long Bulletin, a blog on Australian poetry and criticism. She was the judge for the Reason-Brisbane Poetry Prize in 2011. [1]

White holds a master's degree in Public Policy and Management from the University of Melbourne. In 2018, she moved to Europe, initially to London, then to Berlin, where she completed her fifth collection, titled 'Cities', published in 2021 by Sydney-based Vagabond Press. [2]

Her sixth collection, 'That Galloping Horse' was published in January 2024 by UK-based Shearsman Books, at which time White was living and working in Belfast.

Works

Critical reception

"With her unpretentious voice and subject matter, Petra draws the reader to her and absorbs them with tales of her multifaceted life." [3]

'Sister', from The Incoming Tide, "is a lovely, almost comically surprising poem whose essential structure is that it is about sisterhood only in its title and its last two lines. As the poem progresses through four eight-line stanzas the gap between the title and the content of the poem grows more and more intense so that the conclusion is that much more satisfying:"

Descendant of the Aztec dog-god
Xolotl, who with mangled hands and feet
guided the dead to heaven, his once trans-
lucent form refuses catastrophe; more
than the ailing tabby, the timorous
and watchful high-heeled dog, or the rented
fireprone house, he guards our dangerous
childhood pledge to never change.

"It is one of those rare poems which is simultaneously sophisticated and easy to grasp: it should be immediately anthologized." [4]

"In The Simplified World Petra White more than fulfils the promise made by her first book, The Incoming Tide, back in 2007. For all of her literary sophistication and verbal ingenuity, White is a poet of the world as we know it, an observer of poignant situations – and a conveyor of them. Whether it’s an anonymous, depressed woman walking her dog (‘'not a small one'’) until its feet bleed and then carrying it ‘'all the way home, wherever that was'’, or a Lebanese couple running a take-away for decades, White over and over again leaves us moved by what she has shown us. As well as by poignancy, however, the book is held together by certain thematic threads. One is a feeling for depression, the strangeness of it, the way it cannot be lifted by a mere effort of will. It is ablankness as wide as the long sea'’ (‘'St Kilda'’) and raises the question ‘'Where does illness live,/what does it want? . . . Describe your fear. How do you feel out of 10?/Out of 9?’’ (‘'Notes for the Time Being'’)." [5]

And of 'Reading for a Quiet Morning':

"White’s mini-epic poem, 'How the Temple Was Built', which comprises the first half of her collection, reveals an authoritative voice delivering what feels like a Ted Hughes-inspired sermon on a new Ezekiel myth. The lens here, however, is distinctly female, the account feminist." "... these poems are lit up and muse-inspired, mini Ezekiels all in the face of baffling Gods." [6]

"Petra White’s fourth poetry collection, Reading for a Quiet Morning, is a narrative-driven, subversive poetic experiment..." "Myths and religious script, alongside feminist and secular theory, are shown as one among many ways of interpreting the world, any promises of cosmic revelation always farcically, but no less tragically, limited. But there is resistance and strength within these attempts at sense-making that White subtly celebrates despite her critiques." [7]

Poetry

Anthologies

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judith Wright</span> Australian poet, environmentalist and Indigenous rights campaigner

Judith Arundell Wright was an Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights. She was a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award and nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, 1965 and 1967.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Harwood</span> English poet (1939 – 2015)

Lee Harwood was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.

Geoffrey Donald Page is an Australian poet, translator, teacher and jazz enthusiast.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Tranter</span> Australian writer (1943–2023)

John Ernest Tranter was an Australian poet, publisher and editor. He published more than twenty books of poetry; devising, with Jan Garrett, the long running ABC radio program Books and Writing; and founding in 1997 the internet quarterly literary magazine Jacket which he published and edited until 2010, when he gave it to the University of Pennsylvania.

Pamela Jane Barclay Brown is an Australian poet.

Jaya Savige is an Australian poet.

Lionel Fogarty, also published as Lionel Lacey, is an Indigenous Australian poet and political activist.

Antigone Kefala was an Australian poet and prose-writer of Greek-Romanian heritage. She was a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is acknowledged as being an important voice in capturing the migrant experience in contemporary Australia. In 2017, Kefala was awarded the State Library of Queensland Poetry Collection Judith Wright Calanthe Award at the Queensland Literary Awards for her collection of poems entitled Fragments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jordie Albiston</span> Australian poet and academic (1961–2022)

Jordie Albiston was an Australian poet.

The Anne Elder Trust Fund Award for poetry was administered by the Victorian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers from its establishment in 1976 until 2017. From 2018 the award has been administered by Australian Poetry. It is awarded annually, as the Anne Elder Award, for the best first book of poetry published in Australia. It was established in 1976 and currently has a prize of A$1000 for the winner. The award is named after Australian poet Anne Elder (1918–1976).

The Grace Leven Prize for Poetry was an annual poetry award in Australia, given in the name of Grace Leven who died in 1922. It was established by William Baylebridge who "made a provision for an annual poetry prize in memory of 'my benefactress Grace Leven' and for the publication of his own work". Grace was his mother's half-sister.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Holland-Batt</span> Australian poet and academic

Sarah Holland-Batt is a contemporary Australian poet, critic, and academic.

The Judith Wright Award, also known as the Judith Wright Prize, was awarded annually as part of the ACT Poetry Award between 2005 and 2011 for a book of poems published the previous year in book form by an Australian author. It was awarded for a published collection by an Australian poet.

Martin Harrison was an Anglo-Australian poet.

Peter Boyle is an Australian poet and translator.

Felicity Plunkett is an Australian poet, literary critic, editor and academic.

Valentine Thomas Vallis (1916–2009) was a Queensland poet, lecturer and opera critic.

Stephen Kenneth Kelen, known as S. K. Kelen, is an Australian poet and educator. S. K. Kelen began publishing poetry in 1973, when he won a Poetry Australia contest for young poets and several of his poems were published in that journal.

Helen Haenke (1916–1978) was an Australian artist, poet and playwright whose work was part of an emerging literary community in south-east Queensland in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Lisa Gorton is an Australian poet, novelist, literary editor and essayist. She is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Press Release, Hotel Hyperion, and Empirical. Her second novel, The Life of Houses, received the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction (shared). Gorton is also the editor of Black Inc's anthology Best Australian Poems 2013.

References

  1. ↑ Reason-Brisbane Poetry Prize Archived 25 March 2012 at archive.today
  2. ↑ Vagabond Press, retrieved 21 April 2021
  3. ↑ Sean Harverson, Text Review, retrieved 6 June 2011
  4. ↑ Australian Poetry Review, September 2007, retrieved 6 June 2011 Archived 2 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ↑ Geoff Page, The Canberra Times, 13 October 2007
  6. ↑ Ivy Ireland Reviews Petra White and Magdalena Ball, retrieved 1 February 2018
  7. ↑ Brianna Bullen reviews Reading for a Quiet Morning by Petra White, retrieved 1 February 2018
  8. ↑ "Queensland Literary Awards 2024 shortlist announced". Books+Publishing. 2 August 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.