Helen Koukoutsis's collection of poems titled Cicada Chimes identifies a modern young woman coming to terms with her father's death, an event that brought unresolved issues to the surface of her heart and mind. This title has aural and visual connotations of relentless, shrill cicada noises heard on long, hot Australian and Greek summer days. The image of cicadas chiming can be read as an extended metaphor of the poet's bereavement, but it may also depict how her memory oscillates between the past and present worlds. The chiming sound connotes constant rhythmic motion, which is strangely reassuring given that it is a familiar phenomenon of summer, although occasionally deafening. The poet mourns her father at Rookwood cemetery, and while standing near his grave, she experiences mixed emotions from her past, with her widowed mother next to her in the heat of summer. Her reflections throughout this collection indicate that grief heightens emotions, and so she is conflicted because of the way her parent's generation was marginally perceived by their host culture. She reacts against such marginalization because such limiting stereotypes are out of synchrony with how she views herself in the present.

Helen Koukoutsis is part of a new generation of poets of migrant background who resist being categorized as ethnic or migrant writers because they know such a designation renders their work minor in relation to Australian literary writing. To circumvent this, Koukoutsis resists peripheralization by extending the genre of modern elegy through a feminist poetics of the sacred. She approaches the divine with an animated style, an oppositional voice, and uses an experimental form that merges individual and communal expressions on grief. She draws upon modern Western and non-Western traditional influences and translates Eastern European and Greek cultural traditions, particularly those associated with rituals of mourning and bereavement. Her poems range from historiographical narratives on migration to explorations of intra-familial relations, while raising deep existential questions on life and death that reflect an anti-traditional, feminist spirituality.