The journals of Antigone Kefala

Antigone Kefala is usually thought of as a poet whose powerful expressions of absence and loss stem from her own experience of displacement as a refugee and a migrant, first from Romania to Greece, then from Greece to New Zealand, finally from New Zealand to Australia. This focus, pursued with dedication, and a deliberate asceticism of means, has also caused critics committed to a happier view of things, and Australia’s role in bringing this about, to judge Kefala’s poetry as obsessive, severe, and even morbid. Yet when one thinks about the impact of Kefala’s poetry, it is the expression of primitive energies, the magic of her images, and the transformations of light and colour which appeal most, and which one remembers all the more readily because of their dramatic emergence against what might otherwise be thought of as a dark or melancholic prospect.