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White on White by Anne Elvey & The Sky Runs Right Through Us by Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

by
January-February 2019, no. 408

White on White by Anne Elvey

Cordite Books, $20 pb, 89 pp, 9780975249291

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

The Sky Runs Right Through Us by Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 122 pp, 9781742589596

White on White by Anne Elvey & The Sky Runs Right Through Us by Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

by
January-February 2019, no. 408

Anne Elvey’s White on White and Reneé Pettitt-Schipp’s The Sky Runs Right Through Us both offer ideas of unsettlement in contemporary Australia; Elvey’s is the unsettlement brought by the arrival of colonists, whereas Pettitt-Schipp explores the unsettlement associated with denying arrival. In White on White, Elvey explores the limitations and downfalls of colonialism, and the paradoxical act of ‘building a falling’ that settlement represents. Despite its title, the collection is about the co-existence of whiteness and colour, as in the line, ‘On my desk the whiteout / is shelved beside the pens’. This line is also telling as it is about imprints and markings existing beside modes of erasure. In the prose poem ‘School days’, readers are introduced to the speaker’s skin that is ‘peach and cream with a blue undernote […] the colour of my soul’, which a ‘drop of ink’ would mortally stain. Here, Elvey invokes a thread running through the collection: the potential for ink, the medium for writing and textuality, to be fraught with sin and moral complications. At these moments, readers may reflect on the fact that it was white settlers who brought written language to Australia, with all of its blessings and burdens.

Amy Lin reviews 'White on White' by Anne Elvey and 'The Sky Runs Right Through Us' by Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

White on White

by Anne Elvey

Cordite Books, $20 pb, 89 pp, 9780975249291

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

The Sky Runs Right Through Us

by Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 122 pp, 9781742589596

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