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Poetry

310 pages
Paperback with flaps, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published April 2025
ISBN 9781923106284

Poetry

Antigone Kefala

A commemorative edition

A commemorative edition celebrating the poetry of a great Australian writer, Antigone Kefala, with an introduction by Giramondo Founder and Publisher, Ivor Indyk.

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.

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.

[Kefala] has been writing extraordinary poetry and prose for over half a century and who, though immensely admired and respected, is far too little known and celebrated in Australia… It would be difficult to overstate the significance of her life and work in the culture of this nation.
Elizabeth McMahon

Kefala is a deliberately spare writer, practising an aesthetics of asceticism that is crucial to the power of her work across all forms. Her poetic minimalism belies the meticulous construction of echoes and patterns in her poetry, while the notable formal compression of both her prose and poetry distils intense experiences and perceptions.
Judges’ citation, Patrick White Literary Award

[Kefala’s poems] are supremely confident: composed of clean, terse lines, they ride on the rhetorical surety of the speaker’s voice. They invite you to embellish where they remain silent… [Her poetry is] urgent and necessary, full of sharp revelations about life’s fleetingness and the liminal state between life and death.
Sarah Holland-Batt

Stark, radiant imagery; lean punctuation; the slightly disorienting effect of the syntax; an imaginative vision of sensuous waking life enmeshed in subterranean realms of memory and dream… Kefala engages the senses with startling vividness.
Dimitra Harvey, Mascara Literary Review

About the Author

Antigone Kefala

Antigone Kefala has written three works of fiction, The First Journey, The Island and Alexia, and five poetry collections, The Alien, Thirsty Weather, European Notebook, Absence: New and Selected Poems, and Fragments, which won the 2017 Judith Wright Calanthe Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry. Her collections of journals are Summer Visit, Sydney Journals and Late Journals, her final work.

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