Isolated States was published in 2001 by Tim Thorne’s Cornford Press ISBN 0957756569
(out of print).
It was written with the support of a 1994 Arts Tasmania grant.
“[These] poems are of the sheerest blue: large, clear, bright visions” – Chris Mansell
“In miniature this book takes up the kind of apocalyptic vision of Doris Lessing.” – Kevin Brophy, launch speech.
“Anne Kellas’s delicate, witty poems are often like the dreams of which she writes – sequences of images fused in unearthly conjunctions that remain in the mind of the dreamer.
“Many pieces have a kind of playfulness, 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 experience 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.”
– Margaret Scott
Sample poems from this collection