Volume 3, 2001 |
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Kevin
Brophy reviews in: Famous Reporter, n.24, December 2001. Two weeks after the World Trade Center's Twin Towers fell to rubble on the morning of 11 September 2001, I took my children to the Disney Studio film, A.I (Artificial Intelligence). Towards the end of the film, set thousands of years in the future when New York had been mostly flooded by a rising sea, the hero visited the city and flew past the city's skyline. The twin towers of the Trade Centre stood there, monuments to the twentieth century's civilisation. It was a weird moment, throwing every assumption the film made about the future not just into doubt but into a terrible uncertainty. A few days after watching the film I read a poem called, 'From the City of Alice':
The poem seems to be infected with prescience, even down to the phone calls being made and the presence of television at this event of cinders, skyscraper and flight - though of course it is only possible to see all this in hindsight. Dostoevsky used to read the papers expressly to find reports of events he had already written about in his novels, and critics have claimed Max Ernst and Rene Magritte painted the future. Anne Kellas has written a poem that does something she could not have intended, for she seems to be describing through a kind of dream the events of 11 September 2001 in New York. The thing about loss is that it shows us what was there. In missing it, we know we had all along missed it. The irretrievable mistakes that make up life on this planet - what is the solution? Exit? Or what is sometimes found in poetry? The poem about the building's headlines was in Anne Kellas's second collectgion of poetry, Isolated States, published twelve years after her impressive Poems from Mt Moono. The themes of alienation, exile, island life ('an island near the Pole'), women's condition, and African landscape and politics continue from her first book. In miniature this book takes up the kind of apolocyptic vision of Doris Lessing. Kellas expresses these themes now with a stronger, more assured and more flexible poetic voice. There are fewer of the short impressionistic poems so plentiful in the Mt Moono collection; in their stead there are waves of substantial poems that grow before our eyes and make whole worlds in themsleves: the 'Lucy England Poems', 'From the small green galaxy at the end of the stars' and 'The gunship hat poems' are some examples of these longer poems or suites. There is still, though the sense of a voice hard-won against the odds. The longer poems tend to grow by accretion, resisting a repeated fall into silence, a couplet at a time, each image holding itself steady before the next unpredictable lines:
Anne Kellas has grown in confidence enough to flaunt the surreal edge to her sensual and erotic style, giving her poems a brillian-brittle surface - giving her lines the touched logic of a poetry that knows it need not come up with answere when the questions are so much more important to get right:
and, from the 'Iron green poems', these lines show a mind moving through that strange process of seeing one thing and thinking of another:
Kellas's poetry moves under the provocation of loss, catastrophes, injustices and strong emotion, but at all times her poetry keeps to its method of focus on images, attention to rhythms and alliteration; and takes the opportunity poetry offers for puns and other wordplay. Kellas has an ability to bring both wit and deep seriousness to her poetry. This is one of those books where the poems form a strong bond with each other, the voice of the poet growing throughout. (Kevin Brophy, famous reporter n.24, December 2001.)Copies available at $18.50 from Cornford Press, 6 Salisbury Cresent, Launceston Tasmania 7250. |
" ... In truth, I opened the book, looked at the poems and sat down and set them to music immediately (they wrote themselves) -- soon after we quickly rehearsed them, recorded them ...I am very interested in setting more of her text, particularly utilizing the string quartet/singer instrumentation."
Isolated States by Anne Kellas "Anne Kellas's delicate, witty
poems are often like the dreams of which she writes -- sequences
of images
fused in unearthly conjuctions
that remain in the mind of the dreamer. Many pieces have a kind
of playfullness, drawing on recollections of childhood or fairy
tales
of Alice's Wonderland, but almost always beneath the ironic surface
of glittering puns, light and vivid colour the reader discovers
a sense of grief and loss. Writing out of her eperience of life
in
England, Tasmania and her native South Africa, Kellas reveals with
passion and grace both the loneliness of the exile in a strange
land and the despair of those trapped in their own minds as exiles
from
the sanity of love." "Kellas's poems are unafraid to show
her breakstep mind: she's an original working in the whole world
-- not just a small
corner of it. There are no 'as I sit here being bored' poems here
... this book is big and ambitious. She says her 'veld is lion coloured'
-- I say her poems are of the sheerest blue: large, clear, bright
visions. Talent to burn, this one -- watch out." " ... Of interest in the concluding stages of Isolated States is the handful of poems that Kellas has written about her adopted home: Tasmania. 'Tasman Pensinsula' (p.81), in particular, is a dark, brooding, coastal poem which recalls Gwen Harwood's 'The Sea Anemones'. But perhaps the best poem in this volume is one of its shortest. Written by an ex-pat South African, the concluding lines of 'Landscape with tree' (p.84) remind us that Australian landscape painters (and poets) also bear a heavy sense of responsibility to the darker sides of their nation's history, a history which sometimes speaks more poignantly through artistic absences, omissions and denials that it does through inclusions:
Isolated States deserves to be read
on the strength of this poem alone.".
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Isolated
States