The White Room Poems

It is difficult for a poet to learn from Paul Celan and remain a poet. André du Bouchet is one, and Anne Kellas is another. It is perhaps even more difficult for a poet to learn, as poet, from intense grief: The White Room Poems is a sanctuary where such grief is realized while also continuing to ache.
– Kevin Hart (Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at Duke University).

Also see Reviews by Geoff Page, Kevin Brophy and others

OTHER POETS’ endorsements:

“No-one is a tourist to loss. The White Room Poems will devastate and reawaken you. Anne Kellas shapes barely audible sounds of grief into bell-like clarity. This book would shake a mountain to its core.”
– Ivy Alvarez

“I love the spare, fearless, tender voice of these poems, its play of intellect and dream, ‘with always the music hidden in the order of it.’

I light a candle, trembling when I set it down,
this dancing,winged,
breathing thing.

“You feel you would follow this voice anywhere. These poems, won out of grief and daring, wondrously sing and shine.”
– Pam Schindler (author of A sky you could fall into, and Say a river)

“I’ve read a lot of Anne’s poetry and have sung some in settings by Australian composers. Hers is a unique voice, and one I love. It’s direct, personal and raw. These poems are filled with music, with harmony, through the layering of idea on idea. It’s a journey that leaves you thinking about your own path while giving you a very moving insight into her own.”
– Michael Lampard, Australian baritone

“The White Room Poems take us down into the valley of the shadow of death, but gently, where grief and love are intertwined, and where all of us, inevitably, must go. Here is a poet who knows that poetry speaks the unspeakable, when no other language will do.”
– Lisa Jacobson (author of South in the World)

“Through the use of elliptical lines and concise, often surprising imagery, Kellas has forged a set of poems which interrogate both livelihood and language while remaining true to the lyric groundswell from which they spring. Her unerring focus on place and experience is simultaneously precise and visionary, and makes The White Room Poems a reading experience to savour.”
– Kelwyn Sole (South African poet and academic)