Greek-Australian women’s love poetry: of terrain and transnationalism

This paper seeks to showcase the various facets of love, romantic and otherwise, explored by Greek-Australian women writers in their poetry and prose. It reinforces the paramount significance of contextuality in relation to women’s experiences if verbal privilege is, indeed, going to have the effect of breaking through community-engendered silences. To that end, being cognizant of the socio-historical context of these poems, particularly those of first-generation women writers of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, gives to these works a certain resonant depth, thus saving them from the charge of being merely facile fancies. Further, this paper seeks to demonstrate that those writings emanating from their second-generation daughters reflect persistent intersections with a keenly experienced transnationalism, the traversing of terrain, in all its tangible and intangible complexity, a central feature throughout.