*Excerpt from the speech delivered by Vrasidas Karalis at the book launch of Antigone Kefala: A Writer’s Journey

I always thought of the work of Antigone Kefala not as consisted of poems but of scattered inscriptions in the unknown territory of a lost community. They are found messages, left behind for those who try to find their way back home, after a major catastrophe or sheer wanderlust has deracinated them from home.

There is a famous poem by Henry Vaughan which says: “Man hath still either toys or care; He hath no root, nor to one place is tied,/ But ever restless and irregular/ About this earth doth run and ride;/ He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where;/ He says it is so far/ That he hath quite forgot how to go there.”

I always think of this poem when I read Kefala’s verses: they are indeed metaphysical testimonies, which try to encapsulate the persistent concern of the mind to find a place to reside and make it its own abode. The metaphysical premise of her work is that we are all in search of a forgotten home and wherever we live is an interim state of anticipation and premonition. Her work explores such premonition, the nostalgia for a lost completeness, which is born out of the poetic tension between words and silence.

There are two kinds of poets, the Orphic poets, fascinated by the brilliance of colours and forms, and the Pythagorean poets, hypnotised by the invisible vibrations crystallized in colours and forms. Kefala belongs to the second category, exploring through the minimalism of her verses and the utter simplicity of their structure the hidden symmetries of experience, the endless structures that subsist under the phosphoric surface of everything. As Edna St Vincent Millay wrote, “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare”; this is what Kefala’s poetry is about – the balance of Euclidian geometry that underlies all things and gives them a place in the mental map of reality.

Her work evolved and changed throughout the years after her first appearance in the seventies: the early attempts to explore the otherness of the Australian landscape and of a different linguistic landscape, made also enter a poetic universe of ambiguous semantics. Such ambiguity led her unfolding work to explore the limits of linguistic articulation and reach a point of minimal ellipsis after which everything said is written on the walls of human fragility.
However, beyond memory, absence and nostalgia, Kefala’s poetry articulates the profound sense of experiencing human vulnerability, of being conscious of human weakness and disempowerment, in front of the world, the anonymous powers of the day, or finally from within the acute awareness of mortality.
Within the landscape of Australian poetry, her voice is unique and challenging. It talks about the limits of the mind, about the consciousness of being lost in a world of complexities and fluidities. The poet has always something platonic in her: she must find what survives change and alteration, what remains as an unbreakable geometry of form and configuration, denying the testimony of her own senses.

Kefala’s work is work dedicated to the depiction of existential transparency: there is nothing ‘heavy’ in her verses. They all breathe with easiness, diaphaneity and calmness; there is a stoic gaze over the commotion and the turbulence of everydayness, a smile of acceptance and endurance.

In the beginning, her work was looked upon with suspicion and reservation: yet the polished provincialism of Les Murray’s poems, and of John Tranter’s elegant cosmopolitanism found somehow with her work a gravitational centre. Between an opaque nowness and a diffused omnipresence Kefala’s poetry bespeaks the consilience of all experiences under the formal unification of her poetic mood.

Everything is about mood in her work: not about language but about mood, the mood of human vulnerability, of human perplexed responsiveness to the mysterious signs we receive everyday from this paradoxical, hostile and yet beloved material world.

I would like to thank the poet herself for the humanistic and anthropocentric universe of being she has articulated with her work. It is a great privilege and a deep emotional experience to go through her work as a pilgrim would go through sacred sites.

For this particular book I would like to thank Helen Nickas who was the soul and the locomotive of the whole project. She herself had the original idea, which she was nurturing for many years; this book is her own ultimate monument to the work of Kefala while my name was added out of courtesy and for some peripheral observations I contributed.

Helen’s dedication and enthusiasm was the real force behind not this project alone but so many other projects which she released over the last twenty years with her Owl Publications. I must stress that if something will be left behind as a memorial to the cultural consolidation of Greek Australian literature it will be the work produced by Helen.

Her sensitivity, open-mindedness and sincerity have been one of the main inspiring and empowering presences in the landscape of Greek Australian creative stage and literary performance. Helen has been the apostle of many Greek Australian writers and the ambassador for all small independent publishers. The history of Greek Australian writing would have been different without her. From my part, this book expresses our gratitude to her for her devotion, her love and commitment – ethical qualities which are so rare in an era of narcissistic self-commodification, cheap careerism and higher education fees.

* Professor Vrasidas Karalis is Head of the Department of Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the University of Sydney.