The Incoming Tide
John Leonard Press, $23.95 pb, 60 pp
Luminously alone
The opening poem in Petra White’s first collection is a modest, tantalising, somewhat mysterious poem called ‘Planting’. A metaphor, you might think, for the inspiration and growth of a poem – much as Seamus Heaney’s famous ‘Digging’, also the first poem in a début collection, established a link via the rhythm of digging, between the act of writing and the act of cultivating land, in a particular place and culture. But this is not so. White’s poem is an aside, takes pleasure in evoking the senses’ responses to a fleeting experience, and coolly resists specific interpretation. Who is it about? Where?
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