Reviewed by Jennifer Compton
That Galloping Horse
By Petra White
Shearsman Books
ISBN 9781848619142, Paperback, Jan 2024
The impulse to review a book, to go head to head with the poet’s long, almost perverse, pondering and tinkering and dwelling, comes to me usually from an odd angle, out of left field. Slant. But this review germinated in a simpler and more neighbourly way. I used to run into Petra White around the traps in the Melbourne scene and I followed her burgeoning career — appearances in anthologies and shortlistings and winnings etc — with a fond weather eye. Because I really liked her work. I would characterise it as whip-smart but poised, possessed by a driving force, but mannerly — just the real deal, a slow-motion starburst.
And then she seemed to vanish. So when she surfaced recently on Ross Donlon’s almost legendary fortnightly zoom readings out of Agitation Hill in Castlemaine, I was all booked in. I gathered she is now living in Sussex in the UK with her husband and daughter. And there she was on my screen. Risen extremely early I believe (so many of these details may be wrong) and absolutely Petra White. Just the way I remembered her. But even more whip-smart, even more poised. I fell for her, all over again.
That Galloping Horse is her sixth book, and the first published outside of Australia. Shearsman Books is based in Bristol, in the UK, but before I classify her as an expatriate, and regret her loss, I take note of the assertion on the back cover — ‘Petra White is a singular voice in Australian poetry.’ Followed by three endorsements from Australian elders — Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Geoff Page, and Gig Ryan. I take the hint. You can take the poet out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the poet.
And I tip my hat to Shearsman Books for their largesse. It is indeed remarkable to me that a small press running on the fumes of an oily rag, so to speak, with, I can only suppose, squadrons of native-born poets besieging their portals, should slam their fist down on the kitchen table and assert — ‘Let’s go with the Aussie!’ Or maybe they have an internationalist agenda. I know almost nothing about Shearsman Books. I can only surmise.
I spoke of poise. And I find this a very attractive quality. But then again I also like the pratfall, I like it when the utter awkward splendour of laughter erupts. But I was not expecting a fit of the giggles, somehow, when I eagerly dived into this book at random and came upon this little beauty — if I may pre-empt the title.
Between dreading and desiring sleep,
which ends the day, brings the day,
a woman undressing in lamplight
hastily, flimsily, tripping on her knickers.
O beauty! In the springing seconds,
luminously and suddenly herself. (“Beauty”, p 12)
But, as I began to read more conventionally, from the beginning, turning page after page, pausing to reflect — to make a coffee, to gaze out of the window at the clouds lazily assembling themselves and then dissipating — I came to realise that this lightsome, low-risk morsel was an anomaly. The cumulative effect of this collection is more chilling. There is an ominous accretion of menace, of lurking dread.
They come to us of their own accord, the dead,
tame as horses. We can tell them anything,
our tiny pressed details private as the inch of a closed eye,
we tell them everything, we hear them whisper, as if to us,
as if to themselves, and their own ancestors.
Something about a sunset viewed without the terror of being alive.
They are pure spirit, they say, they will not even hold our hands as we die. (From “Elegy 2”, p 56)
It seems that we may be on thin ice. At any moment the worst could happen. But what even is the worst? We cannot tell.
Here, mid-life, if such a place exists, if it is a place —
we move with the habit of living, somehow risen
from the grace we had when young, gliding like skaters
unaware the pond will crack. Not even Dante,
down in the world of the speaking dead could tell
if what squatted on his shoulders while his rippling legs laboured
through all those circles, was the weight of death or life. (From “Elegy (2)”, p 57)
I should have taken more notice of the cover image. An art work by — Kez Hughes 2020, ‘Ali McCann, Diminished Knowledge, 2018’. An elegant geometric shape with a ball poised atop. But this is actually a tipping point. A nudge, a breath, a thought, and the ball is helter-skelter. Through this close reading of this book I have come to understand that White’s voice is not so much poised as staunch. Do you know the way that a line of poetry will float up in your mind and explain everything? Unbidden, a line from The Waste Land by Eliot presented itself. ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’. And there was my way into understanding the poet’s intent, and her use of poetry.
Now steeped in love’s products, and our future
has unpacked battered brown boxes all around us,
shovelled its many books onto the heavy shelves,
arranged its arcane appliances in the kitchen,
made a child’s bed appear.
And the debris all around us is that of a future
that has turned into a present.
What I saw and did not see in your luminous pupil
when first I seized your hand,
this hand holding mine as we sit up in bed —
almost at home in our strange new bodies —
convinced there is yet more future to come,
sitting up late to talk it into being. (From ‘Elegy (9)’, p 65)
About the reviewer: Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne. Recent Work in Canberra published her 11th book of poetry, the moment, taken, in 2021. She is an avid performer, bringing page to the stage, and won the Melbourne Poets Union Open Mic Prize in 2017 and was highly commended for the Melbourne Spoken Word Prize in 2017 and 2018. She has recently been a guest at the Newcastle Writers Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival, the Red Dirt Poetry Festival, and the Maitland Writers Festival. In her long career she has also had many stage and radio plays produced, including The Big Picture (published by Currency Press) which premiered at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney.