The Whole Forest Dancing
A6 32pp English: ISBN 978-0-9805088-5-7
$9.90 including postage
L’intera foresta che danza
Translator: Michela Graziani
A6 32pp Italian: ISBN 978-0-9805088-8-8
$9.90 including postage
起舞森林的詩
Translator: 樊星 (Iris Fan Xing)
A6 32pp Chinese: ISBN 978-0-9805088-7-1
$9.90 including postage
Toda a floresta dançando
Translators Custódio Cavaco Martins, Lili Han and Nicole Rio
A6 32pp Portuguese: ISBN 978-0-9805088-9-5
$9.90 including postage
About Kit Kelen
Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a well-known Australian scholar and poet whose literary works have been widely published and broadcast since the mid seventies. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes Kelen’s work as ‘typically innovative and intellectually sharp’. Kelen holds degrees in literature and linguistics from the University of Sydney and a doctorate on the teaching of the writing process, from UWS Nepean.
Kelen’s first volume of poetry, The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees, won an Anne Elder Award in 1992. In 1996 Kelen was Writer-in-Residence for the Australia Council at the B.R.Whiting Library in Rome. In 1999 he won the Blundstone National Essay Contest, conducted by Island journal. He also won second prize in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Award that year.
In 2000 Kelen’s poetry/art collaboration (with Carol Archer) Tai Mo Shan/Big Hat Mountain was exhibited at the Montblanc Gallery in Hong Kong’s Fringe Club. And in 2001 another collaboration (essay and watercolour) titled Shui Yi Meng/Sleep to Dream was shown at the Montblanc Gallery. Both exhibitions were published as full colour catalogues.
Kelen's fourth book of poems, Republics, dealing with the ethics of identity in millennial Australia, was published by Five Islands Press in Australia in 2000. A fifth volume, New Territories – a pilgrimage through Hong Kong, structured after Dante’s Divine Comedy – was published with the aid of the Hong Kong Arts Development Board in 2003. In 2004 Kelen’s chapbook Wyoming Suite – a North American sojurn – was released by VAC Publishing in Chicago. In 2005, Kelen’s long poem ‘Macao’ was shortlisted for the prestigious Newcastle Poetry Prize and a re-edited version of Tai Mo Shan appeared in Southerly.In 2006 Kelen was a featured poet in a number of international poetry journals, including The Drunken Boat, Segue, Softblow, 63 Channels, The Poetry Kit and Sirena. In 2007, Kelen edited a feature entitled 'Poetry of Response' which appears in Jacket magazine. Also in 2007, Kelen was winner of Westerly's Patricia Hackett Prize.
The most recent of Kelen’s eight volumes of poetry are Dredging the Delta published in 2007 by Cinnamon Press in the UK and After Meng Jiao: Responses to the Tang Poet published in 2008 by VAC (Chicago, IL). Apart from poetry, Kelen publishes in a range of theoretical areas including writing pedagogy, ethics, rhetoric, cultural and literary studies and various intersections of these.
In December of 2006 Kelen had an exhibition at Creative Macau (Macau Cultural Centre) titled Bridges and Boats. The catalogue for this exhibition was CCI’s 2007 calendar.
Kit Kelen is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Macau, where he has taught Literature and Creative Writing since 2000. Kelen is the editor of the on-line journal Poetry Macao and poetry editor for the monthly lifestyle/current affairs journal Macao Closer.
About the translators
Iris Fan Xing - translator of the Chinese edition
Iris Fan Xing's first volume of poetry lost in the afternoon - a conversation in English and Chinese - was published in 2009.
Michela Graziani - translator of the Italian edition
Michela Graziani is a scholar of cross-cultural literatures, currently teaching at the University of Florence.
Custódio Cavaco Martins, Lili Han and Nicole Rio - translators of the Portuguese edition
Custódio Cavaco Martins teaches Portuguese Linguistics at the University of Macau. Nicole Rio, now resident in Portugal, taught German and Portuguese for some years at the University of Macau. Lili Han is a lecturer in Portuguese Translation at the Macao Polytechnic. She has published a volume of children's stories Climbing a Tree for Fish and a collection of English translations of the poetry of the Manchu nobleman, Nalan Xingde.
the whole forest dancing
air spins
with a leaf that’s falling
and the eye with it
and the breath held there
holds up the sky
river for rhythm
and the clouds scud down
stars keep their calm course
a twinkle
awhile the heart stills
to one beat
this is what a picture won’t catch
this is what eludes the plot
this is what a poem’s for
