Island Earth: New and Selected Poems

Island Earth is a substantial selection of S. K. Kelen's work beginning with his juvenilia and poems composed in the ensuing years.  The poems  are vivid, exciting,  multifaceted in style and tone.   There are lyric journeys, experience and imaginings from the wide world and a vitalist garden in the backyard. There are love and industry in this book. The poems' vision is encyclopedic and intimate, humorous yet deadly serious; bustling with imagery, voices, dreams,  Pacific and Asian landscapes,  technologies, soaring politics, all kinds of creatures, stories, things, people, myths, spirit, fun, adventure, and serenity. 


This is startling and vigorous poetry from a writer who takes head-on the complexities of contemporary life.  A sharp-focussed observer who has travelled in many countries, particularly in South-east Asia, he surprises the reader with sometimes disturbing, but always enlivening insights and by the rapidity of his thought-changes from the comic to the tragic.


Rosemary Dobson,  Canberra, 2006.


. . . a marvellous ear and restless eye, a gift for narrative that challenges as much as it reaffirms, and a willingness to tackle anything that takes his attention. . . a close-ordering of the senses, breaking open into a visual and aural feast.


Anthony Lawrence, Australian Book Review, 2007


. . . sharpens the Australian vernacular against suburban experience, while foraging through the shipwreck of Western literature. His lyricism is rich with allusion and dislocation. . .and a redemptive, recurrent sense of grace.


Michael Brennan, Australian Book Review, 2003


Kelen's poetry is also breezily Zennish. 


Pam Brown, Sydney Morning Herald, 2001


His poetry was more aggressive, interested in a kind of verbal and conceptual, particle-accelerator collision-making and dialectic.  It is headily forceful and enacts, comically, a kind of intemperate will-to-a-better-world and its flipside, an amusing sometimes vertiginous despair.  It is anarchic, lyrical, faux-cynical, romantic—all by turns. 


Ken Bolton, Coalcliff Days: poetry and art at Coalcliff 1979-82 

and beyond, ed. Ken Bolton, Sal Brereton, Kurt Brereton, 2011).


Long familiarity with travel has contributed towards this poet’s clear-headedness, focus, and good humour.  A heightened sense of empathy seems to have emerged – one that crosses the boundaries between nature and humanity, animals and plants.


Patricia Prime, Just Another Arts Magazine, 2001.