States of Poetry Tasmania
'As You Left Home One Winter's Night' by Anne Kellas | States of Poetry Tasmania - Series Two
It’s dawn but it’s dark.
Winter. Your Winterreise
begins. But you don’t want to wake.
I tried to wake you but you wouldn’t, then you would.
If I knew then what I know now.
But there was the ticket, the passport.
Your father’s ready, names and numbers, labels on the luggage.
The car is idling outside.
It’s dawn but dark.
It’s wi ...
I’ll go that way, by sea,
in a ship that sails at night,
dropping life-boats,
like lifts down lift shafts,
onto storm seas below.
Anne Kellas
...'How To Get Rid Of The Layer Of Snow' by Anne Kellas | States of Poetry Tasmania - Series Two
‘Ah, that layer of snow of which you tell me! For a long
time I too had it! But I turned it into the tablecloth my
wife spread over our – pleasantly round – table in order
to host ... so many incarnation ...
A. E. Houseman memorably said: I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat. It’s not an easy matter to justify one’s decisions when faced with numerous poems from which to make a limited selection. There’s no programmatic guide to what makes a poem successful although the impact of a good poem is something we all know and recognise. ...
Anne Kellas’s third collection – The White Room Poems (Walleah Press, 2015) – was shortlisted for the Margaret Scott Prize in the 2017 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary awards. Written with the support of an Australia Council grant, it also received a Blue Giraffe Press poetry award. Isolated States, supported by an Arts ...
... (read more)Fellowships galore
Here where clouds soothe rocks, high above commerce, The bardic robe sits ill. The mist suggests
On the Mountain
I could catalogue the sharper images
of evil but to what use? City tabloids
and browsers will unroll bandages
enough to wrap communal wounds.
the insubstantiality of wish.
Summon a future like some old romantic,
some ...
Window
What is the mind that would invent the lock?
What are the pathways of the brain
that must be followed with no ball of string
to arrive at a device
which excludes? Why would you start?
If this slab of the earth
was where you had always been,
there would be no entry point,
no threshold of distrust, only the base
a ...
Reply from the Women of Tangier
after Brett Whiteley’s The Majestic Hotel, Tangier (1967)
So secretly together do we wear
our separateness, we’re so complete
he gives us the white stare.
Easy to see decay and disrepair
in the spittle and hashish-ruined streets.
But secretly together we all wear
our ...
Notes from the inland
When he goes into that country,
a man loses his thinking
Patrick Mung Mung
A tree opens
a crack ...