The Incoming Tide. Petra White. John Leonard Press.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Petra White, the poet, was born in Adelaide in 1975. The Incoming Tide was her first book. It was published in 2007. In 2008, she was Fellow of Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, completing a five-week residency. Her next book, The Simplified World, was published in 2010. With The Simplified World she shared the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. In 2011, five of White’s poems were selected for inclusion in the landmark anthology of Australian Poetry, Australian Poetry Since 1788. Two of these poems, ‘Ricketts Point’ and ‘Voyage’, feature in The Incoming Tide. The Incoming Tide is funny. Take the poem (a monologue) about a man working for Job Network, ‘One Wall Painted Yellow for Calm’. This extract from the poem features in The Incoming Tide:
I hope you find what’s looking for you, and the
future will take you
with swift undeniable closure. I won’t say
see you tomorrow.
White has a sense of humour in this extract. White works in a building. A cleaner cleans this building in The Incoming Tide (‘Southbank’):
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Elevators dim-lit, dark-polished all day
by a woman from Bosnia, cheerful as Sisyphus,
who greets you with a suicidal smile, her trolley
of rank cleaning products makes her sneeze,
fills her eyes with red wires; she apologises, grins.
She scales her never-done job, a moonwalker
trailing her cargo through the semi-mirrored
obsidian tangle of offices, herself glowing back at her.
You ride up with her, pin-prick halogen lights,
mirrored walls you vanish into, she polishes.
White does not thumb her nose at the cleaner in The Incoming Tide. White writes a nice poem about her. White rides up with her. White also rides with the hippies, some alternative people she gets involved with at one stage (‘Leaving camp, before a storm’):
We patter in ghost-dust,
skim around
squinting for signs, blessings
(eagles, rainbows, anything!);
awed, bowed down, spooked,
darting like children in the empty
house of someone
who may or may not return.
The fourth line of this extract of eight lines has the deft consonance of ‘eagles’ and ‘rainbows’. It makes more sense after reading the extract from the next poem in The Incoming Tide. In this next extract, a man named Thomas takes control of the driving of the hippies at night. At the same time, White rides with him on a jerry-can (‘Night-driving’):
Time and night and day
hurtle by us, through us, in a clear wind, and then: the border,
morning, two rainbows, a wedge-tailed eagle circling us!
The last line has resolution in The Incoming Tide. In the last line, the reader shares the joy of Thomas and White. Another good ending occurs in White’s ‘A Likeness’:
A wall of muscular ghost gums, shedding their splintery
daylight, they seemed to double, ribboning
white and dark. A pulseless quiet
on the river, their naked bodies
crouching in mud;
between them the weaving
capillaries of promise hardy as coral
that wouldn’t survive a sea storm.
Here, in The Incoming Tide, the last line is clever. The most White has to say in her poems is in her endings. White demonstrates, in this extract, that she can conceptualise. The humour of White has a certain veracity. Her poetry is substantial without being prolix. With her word chains and the way she fits her poetry around her office work, White is something of an enigma. Enigmatic as she is, she is also a quite good poet.
Michael Byrne 