Poetry

Poetry brings together all the published poems of the late Antigone Kefala, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Australian literature. Her mixed background in Romania, Greece, New Zealand and Australia gave her lyric poetry a unique richness and grace. Her writing was informed by literary traditions that allowed her to achieve powerful effects by apparently simple means. Her poems are carefully worked, minimal yet resonant, evocative in their use of implication and understatement, startling in their imagery. They confront loss and grief and displacement, particularly as the consequences of war and migration. They excoriate pretension. They also express delight in the present moment, in newly discovered forms of experience and nature.

Poetry includes all the poems in Kefala's six previous poetry books, published over fifty years, from The Alien (1973) and Thirsty Weather (1978), to European Notebook (1988), Absence: New and Selected Poems (1992, 1998), Fragments (Giramondo, 2016) and Journeys (2019). Fragments won the prestigious Judith Wright Calanthe Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry. But most of her poetry has been out of print for many years.

About the Author

Antigone Kefala was also a distinguished writer of prose. She published six novellas, gathered in The First Journey, The Island and Summer Visit, a childhood fable Alexia: A Tale of Two Cultures, and two collections of journals, a form in which she excelled, Sydney Journals (2008), and her last book, Late Journals (2022). In November 2022 she received the Patrick White Literary Award, in recognition of her contribution to Australian literature. She died in December 2022, at the age of 91