from the editor's desk
Review of ‘That Galloping Horse’ by Petra White
White, Petra. That Galloping Horse. Swindon: Shearsman Books Ltd, 2024. RRP: £10.95, 73pp, ISBN: 9781848619142.
Siobhan Hodge
Petra White’s sixth poetry collection, That Galloping Horse, is a showcase of free verse poems expressed with often chillingly beautiful intensity. Thematically diverse, White examines ideas around travel and exile, parenthood and childhood, as well as an uneasiness around warfare and gender-based conflict, in addition to reflecting on life and death. Born in Adelaide, White’s home city appears throughout, but is staged amongst multiple other homes and states—London, Berlin, Chicago—the collection was composed across multiple countries between 2017 and 2023. White currently resides in Belfast and this collection has been published by Shearsman Books, a UK press focused on international, contemporary poetry.
As someone who is particularly passionate about horses, I was curious to see how White had chosen to engage with these animals. It turns out that they do not actually appear until the final, long suite, ‘Elegy’. Comprised of thirteen poems, this section does not employ the traditional elegiac stanza form for which it has been named, but the poems do explore traditional themes of lamentation ending in consolation, although that consolation is frequently thin. There are many standout pieces in this section, making it difficult to focus on only a few. ‘Elegy (1)’ reflects on grief and its insidious presence in the everyday of the survivors, moving from the painful indignation and questions of the first stanzas, shared below:
How are the dead nourished in memory?
What great ship in the night brings the goods that keep them alive?
That story we lovingly mutter to them,
The one about our lives without them. (54)
Before then moving to finish on a far more tender, less haunted image:
The house, the old family life, the dog who will not be exhumed
From his grave in the backyard, his little bones haunting no-one. (55)
In White’s elegies the living are haunted by the dead, wary of further loss, and it is in this context that horses make their first appearance in ‘Elegy (2)’:
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. (56)
This is a poem full of tensions and ironies, as White’s speaker grapples with the balance between past and present, grandparents and new births, life and death, grief and love. The speaker invokes Dante’s journey in The Divine Comedy:
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 (57)
The titular equine motif of rushed movement—controlled or uncontrolled—is a recurring theme for this collection. There are a number of fraught journeys in White’s collection, not only geographical, but within emotive states. The Journal poems—‘Journal in May’; ‘Journal in August’; ‘Journal in March’; and ‘Journal in September’—all set in Berlin 2021–2022, display moments of domestic life descending under an increasing atmosphere of fear and tension, with the poems’ dates coinciding with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. White’s speaker in ‘Journal in March’ foregrounds Dante’s appearance by asking ‘What is paradise and what hell?’ (27) as the safety of her speaker’s home in one part of the poem clashes with the terror of an evacuated man and his husky—‘two beings in infinite fear’ (26)—is showcased earlier in the same piece. Other, smaller pieces are also locked in turmoil with travel, as in ‘Mountain’, where the speaker considers the balance between freedom and safety; what it means to be home:
I thought of home as something I couldn’t feel
the weight of. I wanted only to walk in a circle
away from it and back.
To be anchored by a grizzly mountain,
tufty grasses, nibbling goats,
the relief of clouds in the dying sky (42)
The collection is also preoccupied with how these senses of safety, freedom and agency can be challenged. White’s horses return in ‘Elegy (7)’ to stage a Trojan-like intrusion to the home, echoing the rise of working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The implied pun of ‘workhorses’ comes to mind, as ‘Work, that galloping horse we ride bareback, / clinging to its mane with reddening hands’ (62) appears in the home, ‘almost apologetic, but grinning’ (62), flanked by images of emails and colleagues. White’s horses here are linked with inevitability, but no malice. In contrast, the violence and callous brutality of ‘Zeus on a Weekday’ is a haunting standout piece, with energy matched by the two poems that immediately follow and named for his victims: ‘Leda’ and ‘Daphne’. White examines the anxiety of predation and survival at all costs. ‘Leda’ is perhaps my favourite piece of the entire collection for exactly this subtle demand for justice, survival, and endurance:
What nobody knows is I kept one of his feathers,
a souvenir, perhaps, or warning,
white feather weak as my fist
[…]
I too became a bird (37)
There is a twist here, as White’s victimised speaker—in the myth Leda is raped by Zeus in the guise of a swan—takes on a similar guise to her attacker, while Zeus is depicted as a voiceless white feather, a symbol historically linked with cowardice. Leda is different; changed by the attack, but considering the future:
Of course I thought of what would hatch
inside me, the little birds with mortal wings
and immortal eyes, what would they see.
And what would I see when I looked at them,
children bathed in my blood.
How could I love them, how could I not,
half and wholly mine, brimming
with the sun, its coldness (37)
It is in this ownership and taking back of agency that there is potential for change; a subtle nod towards optimism in the face of this legacy of outrage.
White’s collection is resolutely unquiet, full of dark undercurrents. That Galloping Horse is a deeply engaging exploration of life’s ironies, injustices and balancing acts, with unflinching criticism for violence. Interestingly, there are still pieces that manage to impart a delicate sense of optimism; White’s speakers bear witness, demand justice, find subtle spaces for their own experience and agency in the face of so much turmoil. This wonderful work carries great energy and variety; there is much that can be re-read, and I would entirely recommend doing so.
Siobhan Hodge has a Ph.D. in English literature. Her thesis examined the creative and critical legacy of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. She was winner of the 2017 Kalang Eco-Poetry Award, joint winner of the 2015 Patricia Hackett Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Fair Australia Prize. Her work has been published in numerous places, including Overland, Westerly, Southerly, Cordite, Plumwood Mountain, Peril, and the Fremantle Press Anthology of WA Poetry. Her chapbook, Justice for Romeo, is available through Cordite Books.
