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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?
Toby Davidson, poet and author of Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry wrote:'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].'
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.
