'Antigone Kefala is one of the elders of Australian poetry, highly regarded for the intensity of her vision, yet not widely known, on account of the small number of poems she has published, each carefully worked, each magical or menacing in its effects. Fragments is her first collection of new poems in almost twenty years, since the publication of New and Selected Poems in 1998, and possibly her last. It follows her prose work Sydney Journals (Giramondo, 2008) of which one critic wrote, 'Kefala can render the music of the moment so perfectly, she leaves one almost singing with the pleasure of it'. This skill in capturing the moment is just as evident in Fragments, though the territory is often darker now, as the poet patrols the liminal spaces between life and death, alert to the energies which lie in wait there. And such energies! "Up, in the blue depth / a bird cut with its wings / the light / such silk, that fell / and rose, heavily, / singing through the air.' (Publication summary)
Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time : A Social-Semiotic Perspective
London
:
Routledge
,
2022
24954299
2022
multi chapter work
criticism
'This book brings together a model of time and a model of language to generate a new model of narrative, where different stories with different temporalities and non-chronological modes of sequence can tell of different worlds of human – and non-human – experience, woven together (the ‘texture of time’) in the one narrative. The work of Gerald Edelman on consciousness, J.T. Fraser on time, and M.A.K. Halliday on language is introduced; the categories of systemic functional linguistics are used for detailed analysis of English narrative texts from different literary periods. A summary chapter gives an overview of previous narrative studies and theories, with extensive references. Chapters on ‘temporalization’ and ‘spatialization’ of language contrast the importance of time in narrative texts with the effect of ‘grammatical metaphor’, as described by M.A.K. Halliday, for scientific discourse. Chapters on prose fiction, poetry and the texts of digital culture chart changes in the ‘texture of time’ with changes in the social context: ‘narrative as social semiotic’.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Antigone Kefala’s work spans decades; it is some of the most spare and eloquent writing about what it means to be a woman writer traversing the cultural institutions of writing and publishing in this country. This essay focuses on Fragments, her long awaited and much anticipated collection of poetry, almost twenty years in the writing, and published in 2016. As its title suggests, Fragments is replete with poems that address the fragmentation of human life, her own and others, across various physical and psychic landscapes that are themselves in the process of erosion. In representing the immediacy and specificity of everyday encounters, the poems succeed in metaphorically subjecting time – in the sense of the time of reading the poetry together with our aesthetic appreciation of its formal techniques – to both its suspension, and its decay.' (Introduction)
'In 1971, the poet and critic Alexander Craig declared that Australian poetry was suffering from a fatal virus. He presented his diagnosis in the following damning terms:
'The typical Australian poet writes a good line, then adds three or four lines explaining it: not trusting the reader, he [sic] dilutes any poetic force with a watery, discursive prosiness. This ailment of our poetry seems to be breathed in with our Australian air, a virus permanently attacking our verse all the more viciously because no one knows or admits that it’s there (and that it has been, ever since verse was first written in English on this continent).' (Introduction)
'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, struck me on my first encounter with Australian poet Antigone Kefala’s work: an English-Greek bilingual edition I stumbled across several years ago containing selections from each of her then published collections, The Alien (1973), Thirsty Weather (1978), European Notebook (1988), and Absence(1992). Fragments (2016) represents Kefala’s first collection of new poems in more than twenty years. Like those earlier collections, Fragments effects Banksy’s famous maxim, that ‘art should…disturb the comfortable’.' (Introduction)
'Antigone Kefala’s work spans decades; it is some of the most spare and eloquent writing about what it means to be a woman writer traversing the cultural institutions of writing and publishing in this country. This essay focuses on Fragments, her long awaited and much anticipated collection of poetry, almost twenty years in the writing, and published in 2016. As its title suggests, Fragments is replete with poems that address the fragmentation of human life, her own and others, across various physical and psychic landscapes that are themselves in the process of erosion. In representing the immediacy and specificity of everyday encounters, the poems succeed in metaphorically subjecting time – in the sense of the time of reading the poetry together with our aesthetic appreciation of its formal techniques – to both its suspension, and its decay.' (Introduction)
'Chorale at the Crossing ‘gathers together the work Porter completed after the publication of his final collection, Better than God’. It is an uneven book, with some very good poems, and some, such as ‘A Chip off the Old Blog’, which are little more than creative doodles: one suspects a few of its inclusions are for the sake of having enough poems for a book. That said, there are a dozen or so fully realised pieces, and a few that would make it into the most compact of Porter selecteds. Sean O’Brien has contributed a brief but useful introduction, and Christine Porter has written a thoughtful little afterword on one poem, ‘The Hermit Crab’—a genre we could use a lot more of, judging by the puzzlement with which unpractised but otherwise intelligent readers so often meet contemporary poetry.' (Introduction)
'In 1971, the poet and critic Alexander Craig declared that Australian poetry was suffering from a fatal virus. He presented his diagnosis in the following damning terms:
'The typical Australian poet writes a good line, then adds three or four lines explaining it: not trusting the reader, he [sic] dilutes any poetic force with a watery, discursive prosiness. This ailment of our poetry seems to be breathed in with our Australian air, a virus permanently attacking our verse all the more viciously because no one knows or admits that it’s there (and that it has been, ever since verse was first written in English on this continent).' (Introduction)
