AustLit

'‘Dimitra Harvey's poems stand out for their arresting images and lines, for the precision with which they gather often raw, conflicting moments of perception. Harvey's poems inhabit dry, scarred, searing places, often bristling with menace, and speak them with the utmost eloquence and faithfulness to detail. At times exquisitely beautiful, at times a powerful register of human violence, A Fistful of Hail offers a wise and thoughtful collection of works to be read and reread.’—Peter Boyle

''I couldn’t resist Dimitra Harvey’s evocatively brocaded poem about yellow-tailed black cockatoos, Calyptorhynchus funereus. Astute observation is at the heart of this poem, the poet’s careful pinpointing of particulars is what makes it so memorable, but the poem is so much more than just descriptive, it evokes many tones of mood and it richly maps the birds to landscape, weather and to folklore ... What I enjoyed most is the way the birds intensely haunt the imagination of the speaker … We can see in Dimitra Harvey’s poem how the poetic imagination depends upon emotion, so that by the end, the speaker’s deep connection to the birds allows for an expansion and activation of knowledge.' —Judith Beveridge, Cordite.'(Publication summary)

'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)