from the editor's desk
Review of ‘Ways to Say Goodbye’ by Anne Kellas
Kellas, Anne. Ways to Say Goodbye. Seddon: Liquid Amber Press, 2023. RRP: $26.99, 86pp, ISBN: 9780645713015.
Jackson
In an interview with Ralph Wessman, Tasmania-based poet Anne Kellas comments that poetry can be ‘a way to do the inner work of the soul’. Accordingly, her fourth book, Ways to Say Goodbye, portrays a consciousness endeavouring not only to let go of earthly griefs and attachments, such as lost family members, but also to encounter and record what grounds it, invoking trees, rivers, graves, grandchildren, hospitals, paintings and music.
As befits a book with a Wallace Stevens epigraph, Kellas’ imagery is powerful: ‘the insomniac sun carolled in the heavens’ (25); ‘[t]ime’s a soft-tissue injury’ (27); ‘her shadow behind her like a dark door’ (70). However, these poems reach beyond metaphor and into the realms of dream and imagination—without falling into triteness or sentimentality or resorting to self-conscious artifice—to portray a scanning, searching, singularly creative locus of awareness. For example, in ‘A Document of Clouds’, this awareness flies above the clouds to experience their viewpoint:
I wanted to see through them,
those large floating lenses
looking down on us.
[…]
In between their halting, rhythmic
lines lay the sorrow plane
—an area of thin blue (12–13)
These lines illustrate the mythic tone that permeates the poems. As Geoff Page notes, ‘the atmosphere of the book as a whole is metaphysical’. Like much of Randolph Stow’s poetry, these poems create a feeling of dislocation, enigma and spiritual seeking that, even when it is illustrated by a landscape that may be Australian—‘the pitiful ash-stroked hills’ (31)—is relatable for people from anywhere.
Moreover, Kellas’ poetry is, as Jane Williams remarks, ‘intelligible’ as well as ‘intelligent’, showing that the two are not mutually exclusive. Michael Sharkey emphasises Kellas’ technical skill at making art from the ‘candid vocabulary of plain speech’ to resist ‘pretentiousness in poetry’ and appeal to ‘non-literary’ as well as ‘erudite’ readers. This broad, international appeal is illustrated by the inclusion of the poem ‘Red Angel’ in an academic handbook on bereavement (Stroebe et al. 422).
Often, Kellas uses deceptively straightforward language to build thought-provoking sequences of scenes. ‘Dark River’ is an especially evocative example:
If I were a bird now, where would I fly?
Up, says Psyche,
where the air is dark blue
and the clouds yellow with fright.
So I flew, over a bridge
to the hidden place by the river.
[…]
There was a singing like wind in the wires
as the river rushed past me
rushed through me.
Something old, far away.
It was a mercy, said the river.
But I heard it as mystery, and agreed. (46–47)
Liquid Amber Press have published this book in e-book and audiobook formats as well as print, making it more accessible than most small-press poetry books, especially to overseas readers and those with limited vision or busy hands. Unfortunately, the audiobook is a single MP3 file. It would be more usable (although perhaps more expensive) if it were broken into chapters, one per poem or at least one for each of the book’s four parts.
The audiobook, read by the poet, can provide an enjoyable soundtrack to the text, deepening the reading experience. It demonstrates that these poems are—as poems should be if we want them to last—scripts for reading aloud. Kellas clearly understands how form, especially line break, affects intonation.
Ways to Say Goodbye won the People’s Choice Award in the Tasmanian Literary Awards 2025 Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry. For those of us who appreciate poems that are beautiful and comforting yet somehow unsettling, poems that, while alert and literary, eschew ostentation and welcome a broad readership, this is an encouraging sign.
Works Cited
Page, Geoff. ‘The essential things’, Quadrant 68.4 (2024):89–91. 18 April. Sourced at: https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/04/the-essential-things/. Accessed 24 June 2024.
Sharkey, Michael. ‘Artistic intelligence, fortitude, and grace: Michael Sharkey reviews Ways to Say Goodbye by Anne Kellas’, Rochford Street Review, 10 August (2023). Sourced at: https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2023/08/10/michael-sharkey-reviews-ways-to-say-goodbye-by-anne-kellas/.
Stroebe, Margaret, Kari Dyregrov and Kristine Berg Titlestad (eds.). The Routledge International Handbook of Drug-Related Death Bereavement. New York: Routledge (2024). Sourced at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032657455.
Wessman, Ralph. ‘My bookshelves: a conversation with Anne Kellas’. Walleah Press. Sourced at: https://walleahpress.com.au/interview-Anne-Kellas.html. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Williams, Jane. ‘Anne Kellas’ poetry collection, Ways to Say Goodbye’. Walleah Press, 8 October (2023). Sourced at: https://walleahpress.com.au/launch-Anne-Kellas.html.
Writer, poet and editor Jackson was born in Cumbria, England, and now lives in Aotearoa New Zealand after many years in Western Australia. Jackson has published four full-length poetry collections, including A coat of ashes (Recent Work Press 2019) and The emptied bridge (Mulla Mulla Press 2019), plus work in many journals and anthologies, notably the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. Jackson’s awards include the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize. In 2018, they completed a PhD in Writing at Edith Cowan University, winning the University Research Medal and two other awards. Jackson taught English in China in 2018/2019. writerjackson.com
