Interviews with Anne Kellas

Poets’ Corner with Anne Kellas
Interview with David Ades.

Poets’ Corner is a monthly encounter with celebrated Australian poets, curated by David Ades (online thanks to Westwords).

A tour of my bookshelves with Ralph Wessman
of Walleah Press, online, August–October 2023.

Anne Kellas and Ben Walter in conversation
Fullers Bookshop, 2016 (online thanks to Walleah Press)

Extract:
Ben Walter: “I get a sense in a lot of your poetry that it’s not what I’d read in the work of another Tasmanian poet. Partly, I think, this is true on the level of content. At one point late in the collection you write, ‘this is nature poet country, I’m a stranger here’. But it’s also in terms of the form, the shape of the sentences. I love the sinews of your text, and the way your images burst through at times…” [Full text]

Ivan Vladislavic in conversation with Anne Kellas online, 2005, The ABSA/LitNet Chain Interview series

Extract:
Ivan Vladislavic: “In one of the early poems you wrote in Tasmania, you expressed a “livid fear” of forgetting your past. But I imagine that looking back made it more difficult for you to root yourself in your new territory, a process also dealt with in your work….How have you managed this tension between remembering and forgetting over the years? …. Rereading Poems from Mt Moono and Isolated States today, I was struck by a couple of qualities that seem to be connected. There is something dreamlike, and often nightmarish, just below the surface in your most domestic poems. An item of furniture or the view from a suburban window suddenly becomes threatening or horrifying. There is also a particularly hard sense of materiality: the poems are full of metallic substructures breaking through surfaces; they are weighted with iron, stone, cement…” [Full text]