Book event

Ways to Say Goodbye: Poems by Anne Kellas

Online sales for this event have now closed. Tickets can still be purchased on the door.

To be introduced by Sarah Day, with readings from the book and conversation with poet Graeme Miles.

Kellas’ fourth collection Ways to Say Goodbye reverberates with themes of grief and its legacies within the various contexts of a world disrupted by climate change and social upheaval. The poems take the reader through dream sequences, abstract, ekphrastic and imagistic poems as well as deeply personal poems of loss. The effect is a cumulative building of a quiet world of reflective resilience as the poet tries out possible ways to do what is almost impossible – to love and to say goodbye.

Anne Kellas has lived on the unceded land of Hobart/nipaluna since 1986, having spent the first half of her life in South Africa and the UK. Her 2015 collection, The White Room Poems, written in response to the death of her younger son, was shortlisted in the 2017 Tasmanian Literary awards.

Graeme Miles has published three collections of poems: Infernal Topographies (University of Western Australia Press), Recurrence (John Leonard Press) and Phosphorescence (Fremantle Press). His most recent book was shortlisted in the Tasmanian Literary Awards and his first for the West Australian Premier’s Prize. He has lived in Hobart since 2008 and teaches Latin and ancient Greek literatures at the University of Tasmania.

Since Sarah Day’s first book in 1987, her works have received a number of awards including the Anne Elder and the Queensland Premier’s Awards and Michel Wesley Wright Prizes, and have been shortlisted for the NSW, Tasmanian Premier’s, and Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Her most recent book is Slack Tide (Pitt Street Poetry).

Join them at the Afterword Café.