Anne Kellas may see all of us, not only doubly, but perhaps even more times than that. Her poetic voice says, I see you, but you can't see me. The game of hide and seek is couched in elegant, precise language. Still, I've come away puzzled, and often unsatisfied. I don't really know who she is, or to be more exact, who her narrators are: too many mirrors, angles, and references are shifted around, and often the flat tone creates a sense of emotional detachment.
This becomes disconcerting, especially in the poems that deal with romantic issues.
But when Kellas writes on political issues, she's at her best. The poem "of grey rain it is said" is almost uncanny in its ability to name the evil brewing that's threatening the world's children. To focus, and to keep steady, with the repetition of the phrase "Useless wars." At the time I'm writing this, these lines from the same poem seem so true they hurt:
"I hear Israel recoil
with the aftershot of a gunwound.
My feet slip in desert sand
clean through to concrete Iraq:
dry cement.
Stone impediments to my dreams."
Kellas is good on how life betrays us, and how no one, in the end, is privileged. "From a Christmas card home" is a vignette where the narrator muses that a sugar bowl may sit on a damask cloth, and "no machine guns will disturb its gravity, ever". But could they? Of
course.
In a similar poem, "Reeling out the Blue Oyster tape," the narrator wants to "become that thing within, which bears no branding by the world". Not one of us lives a life without wounds. Aware of that, Kellas becomes complicit; takes us, in her strange, elusive way, to read signs in her life of lost homes, and loved one's faces. Above all, of her memories of South Africa.
Australia is real to her, and valued, but South Africa has all the power and terror of ghosts. Often, in a single poem, Kellas' language can go from banal to sublime, and then back again. These lines from "Everything" fell flat smack in the middle of the poem: "What do I feel?/ Nothing./ Landscape./ Fear./ Terrorism./ Blind./ Hope, despair. Word games./ Scrabble." And then, right at the end, Kellas strikes the right lyric note.
"The unreal blue street at night might as well be cake, glazed in the night. Odd lights
and silence, void. If people are living there they are ants. What they believe is terrible
though they don't tell. And life's still waiting out there, everything."
While reading these poems, I had an image of Anne Kellas as a child, told repeatedly to mind her manners, and that good children were seen and not heard. She was taught of how God loves the world. And that some things could never be mentioned - not at dinner, not to guests, and not even to one's parents. An odd reticence holds the poems back, when deep down, they want to explode, use language like a laser beam against the night sky. There are hard truths in her work, and a well-developed sense of craft. Yet nothing hits us in the gut, shocks us, or stuns us with beauty. If anything, I'd like Kellas to take more risks in her work - let in the nasty, the ugly, and the suppressed. Stop making acceptable surfaces to house the pain, and just give us the honest pain. And more of the blunt origins of that pain.
Now, unfortunately, I have to talk about the production values of Isolated States as a book, as a made thing. It's easily one of the worst looking books I've seen for years. With work this fine, it's a shame that the publisher chose an ugly orange cover, and a design on the front cover reminiscent of high school drawings. And I was astonished to find that poems repeat twice within the book - are there no responsible editors at Cornford Press? Was Anne Kellas sent a copy of the galleys, so she could check on this kind of mistake? For her next book, I do wish her a better publisher.
(Reviewed by Sharon Olinka, September 2003)
