MICHAEL SHARKEY’S review of Ways to Say Goodbye appeared in Rochford Street Review n.37, August 2023. It casts a retrospective eye over Kellas’s earlier collections of poetry.
Excerpts:
“… I could hardly believe anyone in Australia could respond to personal catastrophe with such artistic intelligence, fortitude, and grace that this book reveals…
“… tenderness … 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…
“Kellas is a richly rewarding poet who merits the widest possible readership, as well as acclamation by the most discriminating readership.”
[Full text at Rochford Street Review n.37, August 2023.]
GEOFF PAGE reviewed the book in Quadrant.
Here’s an excerpt:
“… [Ways to Say Goodbye] is best seen as a kind of sequel to her remarkable third collection, The White Room Poems, of which this reviewer concluded that its author is ‘using poetry in one of the most important ways it can be used, i.e. to express the unbearable in words that are almost but never quite equal to their task’ … In the earlier book, Kellas remembers the poignancy of her being ‘Here in the garden — here they’d stood, / with beers in hand, / so carefree, near the garden pond.’ A comparable, but differently-achieved, poignancy is found in several poems in the section that gives the book its title. They include: “If Once a Looking Glass”, “On Going Through the Portal” and “A Missing Vocabulary”. The last of these demonstrates how skilfully Kellas can use abstraction to encapsulate mental states… The atmosphere of the book as a whole is metaphysical — and effectively so.”