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  • Inquietudes, solaces
  • Dan Disney (bio)
Petra White. Reading for a Quiet Morning. Melbourne: GloriaSMH, 2017. 70 pp. A$27.95 ISBN 978-9945275-6-1

Part unauthorized biography, part Miltonic character study, and part examination of what it is that makes us hominids of the sapiens order tick, the first section of Petra White's new collection, Reading for a Quiet Morning, casts an oracular, topological gaze across a place of outposts imagining themselves toward stabilities. In "How the Temple Was Built," the poet imagines a milieu of flat domains propped up by "handmade gods / vivid as puppets held up to the burning sun" (4) and acutely understands metaphysics as an ur-discourse straightening mayhem into particular directions. We are shown how "people organize into families, / make more of themselves" (2), before the dung-eating prophet Ezekiel appears, uttering in tropes infinite and all-too-human, grasping:

    the something-nothing.God swims in him, playfullyspurting water through his nostrils.    He chokes.Unchokes. Now God says start a    war. Bring the enemyhere, set him upon the peoplethen defeat him.

(3)

This is no dogmatic account of that prophet's apocalyptic visions; instead, White's [End Page 330] personifications seem at pains to portray the sixth-century BCE seer as a (semi)average human engaged in a (perhaps imaginary) conversation with "the whiteness of God" (6) and to then imply how these early apprehensions have caused the planet to shudder ever since, resonating across cultures and religions into the schisms that split history into a ledger of wars and ideologies, winners and the rest. White reads Ezekiel as our mad progenitor: he is "seething and seeing, mind-fucked and yellow-pale" (7), "parcelled up in vision" (6). That packaging is a trope that remains sublime, extraterritorial, enduring. "His human words / fall about his hands like amputated buzzard wings" (7), but when the prophet's psychotic epiphanies come to be canonized, a historical discourse begins. Just like Ezekiel, White seems to imply that so too are we all parceled up within these originary delusions.

This long narrative poem is a cosmogony, then, and the poet imagines the construction of a universe and the ordering therein of we sapiens (etymol. "wise"). "What is a human" (9), White has her God ponder, predictably without question mark, before verging into a powerfully weird rendition of paranormal uncanniness:

    God looked within himself and    founda shimmery darkness hiding half his    heart—a thing he couldn't look atand like somebody scraping soot    from bricks,he scraped it off, then whistled it    along,and formed a shape that came out    of him, kept comingas he pulled, heaving and grasping,    as if he was pullinghimself out of himself.

(12)

This is White's own pseudo wisdom literature, the text a testament to the "thread of darkness seamed through all of [us]" (13). What seems clearest is that White is exploring for reasons that will explain the endless (and accelerating) collective compulsion to consume, conquer, dominate: that these dialectical delusions sit within a metaconversation conducted with an imaginary Other-as-deity. Demonic in its energies, "How the Temple Was Built" is a work of studied sacrilege in which biblical proportions are shown to originate in the apocryphal visions of a madman roaming the desert inventing a so-called God. At one stage, the prophet's wife, Esther, asserts (to the God), "You only like the beginnings of things" (27); the implication is that, more than two millennia later, our species is the evidence of its godlessness. Unable to self-manage in our domains, "How the Temple Was Built" infers the ways we have necessarily taken up and invented an extraneous discourse enabling our imprudent, historical global pillage.

If "How the Temple Was Built" is a foundation and framework for this collection, then "Landscapes" is its windows, out of which White gazes into an already "swallowed future" (43) of new humans and their strife. The purview is largely introspective, strongly personal, perhaps even confessional: "Push one self away, and there are others" (46), White writes, in almost an inversion [End Page 331] of Kenneth Koch's ideas contained in "One Train May Hide Another"; for...

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