Sydney Journals: Reflections 1970–2000

This cosmopolitan collection of journal entries from the late Australian poet Antigone Kefala, who died in 2022, contains moving reflections on the tension between modern life and the life of the mind. Kefala makes pithy observations of everything from the lowering of society’s standards to the drift toward uniformity (“Looking at the crowds outside the milk bar at lunchtime. It is as if no one carries an inner life any longer, empty shells full of movement, action, action”). She has regular glimpses of the eternal and universal elements of humanity—“How ancient our gestures are, one sees them inscribed on marble or stone century after century”—but perceives them as in retreat from the rising tide of mass culture, which breeds prejudice, cheapens art, and damages inner life itself. (“What is surprising about prejudice is how... in an open society, [with] free speech and all that... underneath it all, everyone is programmed and the attitudes operate as efficiently as if in the army.”) Kefala writes insightfully and joyously of music, painting, and writing, and quotes copiously from other writers, philosophers, and poets who feel like companions on her constant travels. Throughout, she strives for an open internationalism that abhors small-minded, mass-produced, flattening tones. This veers between the caustic and the elegiac, but never fails to render itself in full color, at perfect pitch. (Mar.)