Nathanael O'Reilly – författare

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.

Boulevard, a poetic journey forged amid the crucible of the COVID-19 pandemic, encapsulates a year of the poet''s life confined to working from home due to travel restrictions to Australia and Ireland, his cherished homelands.

Comprising 76 sections, this collection beckons readers into a nuanced exploration of the extraordinary events unfolding on a boulevard and its neighboring surroundings during this unprecedented time.

Is it a book-length poem or a collection of 76 standalone works? That decision rests with you, the reader.

Step into Boulevard, where the local becomes a tapestry of universal resonance, and the poet''s journey becomes yours to traverse.

Praise for the Author and Work

''Boulevard achieves a poet''s holy mission to elevate and preserve the times one lives in with starkly rich, elegant, Hopper-like vignettes unfolding over time in the micro-view outside his window of one stretch of an American street while hunkering down during the initial period of the Covid-19 pandemic. The everyday is made new and unusual; the seemingly mundane, extraordinary. O''Reilly reminds us that poetry is the alchemy that give us light, even from the darkest moments in the human experience.''

Matt Hohner, author of Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House, 2018)

With irrepressible ingenuity, Nathanael O''Reilly employs the poem as fragment to explore his neighbourhood''s resilience in the jittery and ludic rhythm of life during the pandemic. Highly attentive and closely focused, Boulevard is a superbly crafted and questing poeticization of the hyperlocal-exploring the daily and seasonal tempi of the suburban and the quotidian. Boulevard is razor sharp; it is testimony, celebration and elegy.

Cassandra Atherton, poet and critic, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University