The White Room Poems was shortlisted for the Margaret Scott Prize in 2017.
It was reviewed in The Australian by Geoff Page (13 Feb 2016), by Kevin Brophy, and by Chris Ringrose in Australian Poetry (n.16).
GEOFF PAGE’s review reads in part:
“Kellas has written what amounts to a “livre compose” expressing her grief following the death of one of her sons in Switzerland in 2006. It’s the book no poet, however talented, wants to write. [The book is] “cleverly arranged in six sections, only one of which is not a prelude or an epilogue to the central event.’ Geoff Page speaks of the ‘metaphorical metaphysicality’ of the poems. “Often only landscapes and weather serve to carry the burden, to ‘objectify’ the emotions, as TS Eliot recommended. The following couplet is typical: ‘A sky the colour of a war painting’s background / starts to outweigh the clouds the colour of smoke.’
REVIEW BY KEVIN BROPHY:
“The White Room Poems will take your breath and your heart away, and they might not return them. We long for poetry that was never likely to be made, and now miraculously made, we would not want to change a word of it. This poetry is like that. It is a township of birds, an alphabet of clouds, a rain of wondrous phrases that will take you to the unbearable fringes where
Tonight’s train goes by,
sounds like a wounded beast.
In the heart of the night,
everything holds its breath.
The White Room Poems are a mother’s poems to the son she has lost to “the softly drug”. How is it possible that they can be so beautiful and strong when they are so lost in this young man’s cloud of unbeing? These poems never flinch, but that makes them even more fragile. These poems never stop singing in speech but that does not lift them from their stern night. These poems press on into the reader’s heart, into anyone who has loved, into any parent who recognises what this kind of loss might, just might, sound like if it was made into poetry.”
– Kevin Brophy.
Chris Ringrose’s review was part of his overview of ten poetry books published by Walleah Press, and was published in Australian Poetry Journal v.6, n.2, December 2016. Of the ten books, he wrote:
“The most consistently elegiac of these volumes is Anne Kellas’s The White Room Poems, a very distinguished collection of poems revolving around the drug-related death in Switzerland of Anne’s son. At the Melbourne launch of the book, at the admirable Collected Works Bookshop, I was struck by the mixture of qualities in the poetry as it was read aloud: the frailty and anguish alongside the resilience and creativity, and the intimacy of tone allied to an obliqueness of approach.
The book travels through memories, dreams, fears and premonitions of disaster to confront the death itself, the reactions of others, and then on to a still coda set in various Tasmanian settings including Cornelian Bay and Tinderbox Marine Reserve.
The halting, musical, brief lines demand to be read slowly, and release their meaning gradually.
This is a text to be read and re-read, for its patient anguished exploration of grief, the interaction of its literary contexts (Coetzee, Basho, Celan, The Cloud of Unknowing), and significant contrasting locations in South Africa (where Anne Kellas was born), Europe and Tasmania. It is hard to do justice here to the ominous snatches of dialogue (‘You don’t like my friends!’ says son to mother at one point [42]) or the regrets and questionings:
If I had listened well, would you be here?
Typing, with your castanet fingers,
rests at the end of the bar, treble clefs and silences, pauses
and expert world falls
all your silent silent, silent poems
you never shared with me …
– Chris Ringrose, writing in Australian Poetry Journal, v.6 n.2, 2016