Petra White

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 slips delicately between mischievous irony and...

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...

Odes, elegies, lyric sequences and compact near-sonnets: classical forms of a strong verbal music. A chiming among consonants and syllables, a flexing of line on line, giving invitation to be uttered. The author invests them with free-verse vigour, while confidently drawing in some of pentameter's gifts of cadence for phrasing. Incoming Tide by Petra White brings a unique blend of...