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The poems in this collection were composed using only words that appear in the following texts attributed to the legendary, notorious, and infamous Irish-Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, who lived from 1854 to 1880: The Jerilderie Letter, The Cameron Letter, The Babington Letter and The O'Loghlen Letter.
The poems use Kelly's spelling and mimic his punctuation and capitalisation. This collection was partly inspired by Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang and Ian Jones's biography Ned Kelly: A Short Life, along with the author's own visits to many of the important places in Kelly's short life, which form the setting for the poems.
The collection attempts to answer a simple question: what if Ned Kelly wrote poetry?
Praise for the Author and Work
'Borrow[ing]' from Kelly's letters, 'Wombat[-]clever' O'Reilly has moulded found poetry that is 'Fearless free and bold' as the Australian bushranger. His lines 'gallop' like the 'Stallion[s] the greatest horsestealer borrow[ed].'¿¿
Stuart Barnes, poet. Like to the Lark (2023) and Glasshouses (2016).
In Selected Poems of Ned Kelly, O'Reilly allows the famed outlaw's inventive sentences room to breathe and perform anew the rebelliousness which 'made the country ring / with the name of Kelly.
Toby Davidson, poet and author of Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry.
About the author
Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O'Reilly teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. His poetry collections include Boulevard (Downingfield Press, coming early 2024), Landmarks (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024), Dear Nostalgia (above/ground press, 2023), (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), BLUE (above/ground press, 2020) and Preparations for Departure (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017).His work appears in 125 journals and anthologies published in 15 countries, including Cordite Poetry Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Mascara Literary Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Southword: New International Writing, Trasna, Westerly and Wisconsin Review. He is poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.
