Isolated States

ISBN 0957756569
Cornford Press, 2001
Cover design: Tim Thorne
[Out of print; copies available from the author and some Tasmanian bookshops]

From the City of Alice

I have eaten concrete.
It is bitter, tastes of money.
I became as tall as a skyscraper
and sent out a parachute
because my world had failed.
And I would land beyond the cinders
and I would not crack the eggshell of the world.
I phoned the press, the TV stations, and my mother,
and told them all to watch the building's headlines.
I told them I have a parachute 59 storeys high,
that I could fly.

This poem, translated by Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho appears in the Portuguese literary journal, LOGOS: Biblioteca do Tempo n.10, May 2022, .

"Anne Kellas's delicate, witty poems are often like the dreams of which she writes -- sequences of images fused in unearthly conjuctions that remain in the mind of the dreamer.

Many pieces have a kind of playfullness, 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

[Her] poems are of the sheerest blue: large, clear, bright visions
– Chris Mansell

“The themes of alienation, exile, island life, women's condition, and African landscape and politics continue from her first book. In miniature this book takes up the kind of apocalyptic vision of Doris Lessing”
- Kevin Brophy, launch speech, on the famous reporter website).