Ivor Indyk: a note on Poetry by Antigone Kefala

Read an excerpt from Ivor Indyk’s introduction to Poetry (April 2025), a commemorative edition bringing together all the published poems by Antigone Kefala.

In all, Kefala’s poetic oeuvre comprises little more than 200 poems. Most of the poems are short, finely honed scenes, like moments suspended in time, usually less than a page in length, and remarkable for the minimalism by which they achieve their expressive effects. They are also often combined in sequences, to allow for a more intense exploration of the situation, or the state of mind, which is their subject. Composed of three, four, five or even six parts, the sequences are dramatic in form, epic in their scope. Time loops and parades, threatens and transforms – it is here that one feels most strongly the torment and tragedy of Kefala’s own experience as a migrant.

This does not mean that the poems are to be read simply in personal terms. From the beginning they open large perspectives, through suggestion and implication, no matter how precise their focus. They portray a world, one whose logic has become altered or fractured, its features transformed in both magical and threatening ways. In The Alien, as in Kefala’s subsequent collections, dreams and memories present their own strangely ordered realities, signs and shadows point to what is absent, to abandoned, desolate or haunted places. Death lurks in the interstices. The experience of migration is not necessarily given as the reason for this heightened awareness, though its impact is keenly felt. It is a world populated by survivors, ‘newcomers from old countries’, but not only by them. The peanut vendor and the acrobat, the concert goers in furs, the solitary at the motel window – all feel the precarity of existence.

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Kefala’s poetry may be rooted in the experience of migration, but there is something in this experience, the crossing of borders, the traversing of realities, the shifting of identities, which propels her poetry to the extremities of emotion – to terror, fear and desperation – and also, because the effects are so magical and strange – to wonder, awe and release.