Ways to Say Goodbye by Anne Kellas, Liquid Amber Press,  2023. 

I received a pre-publication draft of Anne Kellas’s most recent book early in March, when I was offered, and enthusiastically seized, the chance to endorse the work of a poet I have admired since first acquaintance with it. The collection was such a knockout that I could hardly believe anyone in Australia could respond to personal catastrophe with such artistic intelligence, fortitude, and grace that this book reveals.

It is another such masterpiece as its precursor, The White Room Poems, which centred on the grief and effort to come to grips with the death of a son. If that book was a knockout for its wide-ranging search through the resources of poetic speech for some consolation—ultimately, the very act of writing the poems—this latest book, in part reprising that heartrending loss, raises an even greater monument to life’s continuance and sorrow.

As I read and re-read the poems, comparisons sprang to mind: Hayden Carruth’s long, heartbreaking poem, ‘Dearest M—’, written in the twenty-four hours following the death by cancer of his beloved daughter; Michael Rosen’s Sad Book about his grief for his dead son; or John Betjeman’s poems ‘On A Portrait of a Deaf Man’ and ‘To a Child Ill’, both concerning father and son relations; or Fay Zwicky’s ‘Kaddish’, for her mother’s death. Poignancy is kept at bay from maudlin sentiment by matchless ‘tact’. Death, like the intensity of love, is irresistibly a poetic subject. Poems concerning emotions associated with both phenomena traditionally attempt, and at best succeed, in framing the inevitability of time and not-time. sentimental expression simply won’t do—any more than a readymade ‘Sympathy’ or ‘Best Wishes’ card can convey emotion beyond the facile gesture.

Tact demands more: sureness of touch (the origin of the word), the glancing result of maturity of judgment and knowledge of one’s capacity to choose the best words and the best form. It’s knowing also what sophisticated readers understand and expect of the mode, in full consciousness of the best examples in one’s language. Something like a slow-tempo E minor chord progression, played can provoke in some listeners a similar mood of melancholy. Zwicky wrote as epigraph to her poem ‘Poems and Things’, “be precise, said wise Wei T’ai / about the thing / but reticent about the feeling”. Quite so.

Why such notable elegiac works endure is not a result of aiming at immediate celebrity, though some examples, relating to public figures and those in the news endure on account of the noteworthy nature of their lamentable death (Charles Wolfe’s ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’, Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died’, Alec Hope’s ‘Ode on the Death of Pius the Twelfth’, Jack Davis’s ‘John Pat’). Nor is the lasting nature of many elegies attributable to the poet’s striving for the elevated diction of previous ages. As Zwicky also remarked, in her ‘Groundswell for Ginsburg’, “We don’t live in the Lake District/ among rural men, rural come to think of it/ women, or ballad with a tribal beat”. The language must be modern, and subtle, if readers or listeners readers are to acknowledge authenticity and genuine sincerity. Tact is not exemplified by a hand-on-heart public affirmation of love of nation, say, or the fleeting, impulsive identification (‘like’) with some current celebrity. The gap between run-of-the-mill formulae and the language of conviction couldn’t be wider.  

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I hadn’t read all of Kellas’s published books until I thought about what I could write for her publisher. Happily, I received copies of Kellas’s first and second books in time to gain a better sense of her progress. Poems from Mt Moono, published in 1989 by Hippogriff Press in Johannesburg, after Kellas had migrated to Australia, records more than the different landscapes of Swaziland, Johannesburg, Tasmania and Hobart. As her friend, the poet/publisher Lionel Abrahams wrote in ‘To Anne Kellas in Exile’, his introductory poem in the Mt Moono collection,             

… now I discover poetry does change things:
yours transmutes not only your belonging,
complicates my deprivations with strange gains

                            … …

I live a little now among
the humpy hills of New Town in Hobart,
and Australia’s island has become
one piece with my piece of Africa.

In a word, he says poetry “earths also me into the foreign ground”—a gracious way of remaining in contact with his departed friend. Kellas’s large themes in the Mt Moono poems included exile, sadness, absence and memories.

Her poems include those on life in London, changes of address and the emptiness of new lodgings, and such memories suffuse ‘Compton’s place, Mbabane, 1979’:

I must keep death out
Wash the walls
Light candles
Tell beads
Untie the spiderwebs

 and ‘This is Madness’:

This is madness
Suddenly coming into the room
Frightened of my own furniture
All standing there polished
And waiting, waiting.

And ‘The Home-maker’:

When she woke up they had moved all the furniture
Changed the wall hangings.
Everyone was dressed in black
With pale make-up and black netting
Over heavily mascara snake eyes

Similar sensations may chime with readers who have changed countries, or even States or suburbs. Estrangement is not the sensation of those separated across oceans from familiar circumstances and relationships.

A deeper dive into current events occurs in a poem titled ‘Bullet holes’: “I was saying, why did we bother / to come all this way /if this can happen here…’. These have a mood of disorientation that also surfaces in works redolent of symbols and dreams – ‘Twenty Tigers’, ‘Somebody let the tigers out’, and ‘So here I sit’ (“Out they come,/ tigers/ anatomy figures/ museum pieces/ my own alphabet / of past lives’. The dreams are quasi-Surrealist compositions and a literary reference in the first-mentioned ‘tiger’ poem gives a clue to the jumble of realities:

Listless before we left. I browsed in books
In Anna Kavan’s dream house behind a hedge
That became a forest
From whence stepped the tiger
And drew her out to sea.

How splendid, I thought, to encounter Kavan in a work so close to home! And how mysterious the reference will be to anyone who has not read Kavan’s extraordinary autobiographical novels (Let Me Alone, 1930; and A Stranger Still, 1935, or her wonderful short stories, such as ‘A Bright Green Field’ — in which the field follows the speaker around) or ‘Julia and the Bazooka’ (a story of altered reality). These stories I first read in New Zealand many years past, and they resonate still. Kavan’s life of uprootedness, addiction, changes of general appearance (hair colour, clothes), and places of abode (France, England, Burma, Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand, Indonesia, New York), along with her changes of nominative identification (Helen Woods; Helen Ferguson; Anna Kavan) declare a writer tired of realist writing that eschewed the complexity and complexes of the individual. Her writing followed no stylistic pathfinder though reviewers sought to locate her dreaming and nightmarish scenarios with reference to those of Kafka. Kavan’s fictions are set in alien but strangely familiar places, like ‘the southland’ and ‘the other country’ – landscapes lucidly presented though largely of the mind and jagged emotional states. Kavan’s fiction incorporates alienation and real or fictive leopards. John Betjeman compared reading Kavan to the sense a doctor in the spell of the Ancient Mariner might have experienced. So, similarly, now and then, Kellas’s poetic vignettes of estrangement and of separation from familiar moorings and people strike me. A poem titled ‘A Nowhere Place’ toward the end of the Mt Moono collection declares,

It’s beautiful, this heaven.
God’s grace, this island
No superpowers, almost.
Rainforest, landscape. I have my faith
Satisfaction of the senses. I’m here,
This artist’s enclave, paradise for painters.
God’s provided everything for this self-exiling.

And shortly after, the following:

The only time I’m real is when I dream I’m dying
The only urgency, one I self-create.

Kellas’s dream-tigers and, in her following collection, Isolated States (Launceston, Cornford Press, 2001) the apparitions and painted or stained-glass appearances of Angels continue to constitute a spiritual world inherent in the world of tangible experience. Against this, fears of ceasing to be real to oneself, or of suffocation by threatening external forces are associated with social and politically conformist expectations. An epigraphic line from Milan Kundera sets the tone of this collection: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. The aptness of the quotation is evident in several poems. Consider ‘Poem for Z, under house-arrest”, dated Johannesburg, 1988:

I take my prison with me.
Any four walls,

Any old town
Will do.

You may come to me
One at a time.

That’s the game.
I don’t do crowd scenes.

I define myself

Endlessly.

This poem works on various levels, of which one is that it is an ars poetica. Its literal sense is reinforced by the poem’s placement between a poem ‘In the desert that is my rich homeland’, whose opening line repeats the title before “there is a prison I visit, someone I have come to see”, and whose concluding line is “I wake up crying in a strange town”. The following poem. ‘Flying away’ is addressed to a friend and commences,

In the State of Emergency
I leave you.
In your very own personal state
Of emergency
I leave you. I leave multiple copies of you
Although I take everything with me
I cannot take you.

To say the political is personalised in such lines is self-evident, and it brings us back to Kellas’s sense of the mind as its own place — the mind that, Blake-style, forges its own manacles. To such a mind, the poem ‘The Ocean’ brings a sense of overwhelming engulfment:

The ocean came again last night.
Not just ocean,
not that satin expanse
of star-net or dazzle-wave.

 …

not angry storm,
but the one complete wave,
overpowering innocence,
sense.

I put up my hand to stop the ocean
understand Canute.

The baleful threat to sanity, noted in such Mt Moono poems as ‘This is madness’, and ‘Bullet holes’ (a dramatic report of a person dying slowly in public) comes clearer in this final statement. A group of poems concerning Swaziland reprises the aura of hopelessness and despair. A poem called ‘Everything’ calls up a series of dream-like cinematic vignettes of life in the “bowed-out scrape and dustbowl of the country”, where a child in rags “drags something”, and where “weak men tippling toppling / felled trees”: “If people are living there they are ants”. A further poem ‘From the City of Alice’ is less to do with Alice Springs than a grim version of Alice in Wonderland’s absurd landscape where “I have eaten concrete. / It is bitter, tastes of money’. A poem titled ‘Conversation with some Y2K thrown in for good measure’ proclaims, “How civil we all are / until the rainbow and the blackout curtains fall”. Set in Australia, one partner in the conversation asks another “Are you mad?’” and the other replies, “Yes partly”. The phenomenon of the Y2K beat-up is not so distant so long as many of us can recollect the food and essential supplies-stockpiling frenzy of some acquaintances, and the grand delusion that the world was falling into a mad vortex. Kellas’s headnote to the poem is John 9.14: “The night cometh, when no man can work”. Love in such a political climate is tainted by circumstance. In ‘There’s a sort of love poem’, tenderness is balanced against loss, fruitfulness with the “ashes of our love we warm up like old toast / in each other’s arms each night”. Against such corrosive quotidian threats to sanity and life, the cost of courage to undertake self-exile from country and human connections and to rely on love is pitifully comprehensible. It strikes the right note for global events of the past half-century even beyond Africa.

I’m not surprised that Tim Thorne, who named his press in commemoration of his personal hero, John Cornford, who volunteered to fight in the International Brigades and died at the age of twenty-one in action against the Nationalist forces in Spain, recognised Kellas’s intellectual and humanistic temperament and chose to publish her Isolated States.

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In a 2016 Australian Poetry Journal review, Chris Ringrose, who attended the Melbourne launch of Kellas’s third book, White Room Poems (Hobart: Walleah Press, 2015), hailed the work as a ‘very distinguished collection’. He was struck by ‘the mixture of qualities in the poetry as it was read aloud—the frailty and anguish alongside the resilience and creativity, and the intimacy of tone allied to an obliqueness of approach’. He noted ‘the interaction of its literary contexts’ and the ‘significant contrasting locations in South Africa (where Anne Kellas was born), Europe and Tasmania’. He also remarked on the seriousness of the works and the exquisitely modulated pace of the lines, underscored by the spaces between statements.

The halting, musical, brief lines demand to be read slowly, and release their meaning gradually.… This is a text to be read and re-read, for its patient anguished exploration of grief, the interaction of its literary contexts (Coetzee, Basho, Celan, The Cloud of Unknowing), and significant contrasting locations in South Africa (where Anne Kellas was born), Europe and Tasmania. It is hard to do justice here to the ominous snatches of dialogue.

Ringrose was on the money on every count. So were the intellectually and spiritually astute Kevin Brophy and Kevin Hart who supplied the publisher’s back-cover appreciations. Brophy wrote that the poems will take your breath and your heart away, and they might not return them. We long for poetry that was never likely to be made, and now miraculously made, we would not want to change a word of it. This poetry is like that. It is a township of birds, an alphabet of clouds, a rain of wondrous phrases that will take you to the unbearable fringes where “tonight’s train goes by, sounds like a wounded beast. In the heart of the night, everything holds its breath.

Kevin Hart rated Kellas with André du Bouchet, notable poet of ‘otherness’, which strikes me as spot-on, in light of the recurrent familiar ‘things’ and ‘somethings’—pre-inhabited houses, or drawers full of clothes that seem so odd considered as signatures of a life, or the ominously threatening furniture that Kellas describes — that make up a world at once familiar and alienating. Like du Bouchet, Kellas is a poet enlivened by the physical world, especially topographical features and clouds, and the interplay between outer and inner states. Kellas’s poems were a revelation to such sophisticated readers, and to all who heard them read by the poet herself. Like Du Bouchet also, her language points to inexpressible emotion, just as objects, features of landscape (veldt or rainforest, flowers, or ocean), understood as astonishing or awe-inspiring, can be approached but never quite grasped in words. In the poem ‘Marigold Marigold’ from The White Room Poems, Kellas considers the graves in Hobart’s Cornelian Bay — one of the great Australian cemeteries, superbly located place to contemplate mortality and history. Visitors read inscriptions or talk to their dead:

Mr Burns’s grave is handy as a seat.
The gravestones are my friends.
We all face east.
We greet the day, the moon, the snows.
We don’t bow to the wind. Like cards.

 ………

Mr Nichols is there each day.
Sits talking to his wife.
Kisses her headstone goodbye
Like a hospital visitor but more loving.
Tells me that he’s never missed a day.

The tenderness conveyed in these excerpts is characteristic of Kellas’s poetry of intimate relationships. It’s what appeals in her poetry to non-literary readers, as well as to the well-read and erudite. We recognise affection without reaching for theories within the works themselves as to why we should or might do so. We distrust, as Keats asserted, poetry that has a design on us. I think Kellas’s poetry succeeds magnificently against the grain of poetry that is organised according to a plan. It has the simplicity of direct speech and of genuine human-to-human discourse. It’s a defence of connection and, taken all round, a model of how to do so instinctively, by relying on the veracity of one’s emotions—as Gwen Harwood, Kellas’s sometime co-conspirator against pretentiousness in poetry and in performance of music, understood and exemplified. It has to do with the art of pleasing, even when the subject is dour.

It is no surprise to meet with such well-told but dour phenomena as death and estrangement in Kellas’s new collection, Ways to Say Goodbye. Images of clouds, dark spaces, birds especially doves), and angels recur. The poem ‘The Memory Garden, revisited’, establishes the tone:

In dreams, the boy with huge blue eyes came again.
I cannot help this child.

The boy lived in the clouds.
And the angels too.
He was The Littlest Angel—

my little brother, my mother said
and never said.

The preceding poem, ‘Chiaroscuro’ recalls the scene:

I could see you lying in a darkened room.

A woman in Japanese robes
Patterned, two-dimensional like cards
As heavy as steel armour
Guarded you as you slept

She hushed me and kept me
From touching your ice-white face.
It was your fear I had wanted to visit
But it had left you as soon as you slept

Where, I had wanted to ask
Were you travelling?

High, you said
high.
Higher than clouds you can see.
I’ll be dreaming there don’t you worry.

The literary reference in ‘The Memory Garden Revisited’ is to Charles Tazewell’s children’s story, ‘The Littlest Angel’. I am old enough to recall hearing the dramatised recordings of the story on ancient shellac disks, in a house suffused with a similar tragedy.

The dead child theme recurs, confirming the truth of a truism of comfort, cited by Michael Rosen and others, that our dead are not wholly dead but alive in us, in our memory.

Another poem soon after, “Travelling To My Mother Last Century’, reprises the aperçu concerning memory: “My mother calls to me from her place far away / in deep mind, where she has built a tower of knowing’. The clouds that suffuse the imagery of this book may be those of unknowing, beyond which is the realm of angels of knowledge. ‘The Mute Dove of Distant Places’, inspired by or redolent of Robert Alter’s translation of the Book of Psalms, puts this another way. The poet declares,

I’m stuck here listening for the blackbird.
Waiting for the meaning of a dove

To be delivered
Like an egg
In a nest
Unopened.

The image is comforting but the sense ambiguous: the ‘meaning’, even if delivered in the safe place, remains unopened. This is at once Hopkinsian clarity and Keatsian-negativity at work. In ‘Twin Angels’, a poem provoked by a Diane Arbus photograph, the two persons in the image “become clouds / form a spiral network of stars”, and in several successive poems, Kellas offers so many instances of rainforest, cloud and bird images as to chime with my memory of Wallace Stevens ‘ways’ to look at a blackbird. ‘Silent Mountain’ intensifies this sense even in its structure:

One bird calls across the air
Between here and the ocean.
A cross-hatching of black
lies on the grey waves.  

……

A bird harps on one point.
A bird harps on a point.

 How felicitous, I think, is that word “cross-hatching”; how lovely the ambiguity of “harps”.

A second section of the book is titled ‘Various Angels’, and the fleetingness of music after the event is evinced, and further visited, in references to bird song: “An angelus of sorts / has called us into silence” (‘On Hearing the Bells of St John’s, New Town’).

Who reads a book of hours
or marks this place in time?
Something soft that sang to silence
in a lordly way allowed
is gone, clear as birdsong
gone.

Not all of Kellas’s angels are comforting. The poem “On Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’” portrays the witness-bearing Angel of history: “blown backward through time… / looks back in horror / on the twentieth century’s crimes”; “His hair streams in the firmament / like the blood of Marlowe’s Christ”. And in a poem, ‘Conversations with the Angel’, Kellas inquires “But what action do you want? / Do words count?’ — the perennial self-doubt of a poet concerning the efficacy of her craft. The poem concludes, “When I wake it’s morning / and no stars shine. / Kyrie Eleison”.

At the end of the volume, Kellas revisits the opening vignette:

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. 

… …

It’s winter here but summer where you’re going.
I’ve bought you coats and bags of clothes and phones
And all the usual clutter’; jammed and folded.

You turn back to sleep. No, no, wake up, I urge you
And you do.

The subtlety of this farewell departure is akin to that of ‘Abscheid’, fourth of Strauss’s four last songs, but it has the chill self-awareness of Schubert’s ‘Dream of Spring in the Winterreise, that concludes with “When shall I hold my beloved in my arms?’ Kellas’s verbal technique is a lesson in tact: the repeated ‘W’ of “Winter” and “Winterreise” and “wake”, and repeated again in the next line; the soft “b” of “Begins” and “But” in subsequent lines; and the splendid balance of “It’s winter here but summer where you’re going” and the alliteration and assonance in following lines, all in candid vocabulary of plain speech. This is the poetry of heartbreak and loneliness, leavened only by consummate craft.

Kellas is a richly rewarding poet who merits the widest possible readership, as well as acclamation by the most discriminating readership. We’re fortunate she chose us.

  – Michael Sharkey

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Michael Sharkey is author of several collections of poetry, most recent of which is What If I Told You? Unlikely Love Poems on Several Occasions (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023).

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Ways to Say Goodbye by Anne Kellas is available from https://liquidamberpress.com.au/product/ ways-to-say-goodbye/

 

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