Summary: In this paper, we present an efficient spectral-element method (SEM) for solving general two-dimensional Helmholtz equations in anisotropic media, with particular applications in accurate simulation of polygonal invisibility cloaks, concentrators and circular rotators arisen from the field of transformation electromagnetics (TE). In practice, we adopt a transparent boundary condition (TBC) characterised by the Dirichlet-to-Neumann (DtN) map to reduce wave propagation in an unbounded domain to a bounded domain. We then introduce a semi-analytic technique to integrate the global TBC with local curvilinear elements seamlessly, which is accomplished by using a novel elemental mapping and analytic formulas for evaluating global Fourier coefficients on spectral-element grids exactly. From the perspective of TE, an invisibility cloak is devised by a singular coordinate transformation of Maxwell’s equations that leads to anisotropic materials coating the cloaked region to render any object inside invisible to observers outside. An important issue resides in the imposition of appropriate conditions at the outer boundary of the cloaked region, i.e., cloaking boundary conditions (CBCs), in order to achieve perfect invisibility. Following the spirit of [Z. Yang and L.-L. Wang, Commun. Comput. Phys. 17, No. 3, 822–849 (2015; Zbl 1373.78458)], we propose new CBCs for polygonal invisibility cloaks from the essential “pole” conditions related to singular transformations. This allows for the decoupling of the governing equations of inside and outside the cloaked regions. With this efficient spectral-element solver at our disposal, we can study the interesting phenomena when some defects and lossy or dispersive media are placed in the cloaking layer of an ideal polygonal cloak.