| Jan Kemp was born in Hamilton, New Zealand, in 1949. She was the sole woman anthologized in The Young New Zealand Poets (1973), and in 1979 co-starred with Alistair Campbell, Hone Tuwhare, and Sam Hunt on a national poetry-reading tour. During the next two decades, while the gender balance among New Zealand poets spectacularly changed, she taught in universities in the South Pacific, Asia, and Europe. For nine years she was based at the National University of Singapore. More recently, married to eminent professor and analyst of postcolonial literature in English, Dieter Riemenschneider, she and her husband shuttled between the two hemispheres, with bases in Frankfurt and Auckland, finally settling outside Frankfurt in September 2007.
Kemp's poems bear the evidence of her cosmopolitan career. They are prompted by diverse places, people, events, and objects, but the outer world around which she moves always shades into an inner world of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Kemp has an eye for the tiniest detail and an unusual capacity to enter into other lives, even past lives: the towns and cities she visits are peopled with the dead as well as the living, so poetry may be sparked by snippets of information about historical figures who inhabited them. Kemp is adept at reading signs and hearing sounds. She delights in the quirkiness of language, its rhythms and tones, as words echo and chime, forming patterns. Her poems are made to be heard. She herself is their ideal performer.
1 Puriri 0.29
2 Hexandra in recess 1.03
3 Master of Ceremonies 0.39
4 Poem for R A K Mason (1905 - 1971) 0.51
5 Night Poem 1.21
6 Old Railway Guard 1.05
7 Turkey Talk 2.19
8 In golden smock, walking 0.58
9 Down the first road 0.51
10 West Coast town 1.00
11 Pohutukawa 0.50
12 Walking a beach 1.23
13 Atalanta 0.34
14 Melanion on the waterfront 0.47
15 Chagall windows, Fraumunster, Zurich 2.41
16 To my father, M.H.K. 3.10
17 Hong Kong sounds 1.02
18 The other hemisphere 0.59
19 The dance of hemispheres 1.07
20 Father's metamorphosis 1.16
21 Sky crosses, Singapore 1.47
22 At Kikowhakerere Bay 0.52
23 The terrible angel 0.44
24 Truth 0.29
25 Song of Noah's wife 1.14
26 The Ballad of Donna Quixote 2.50
27 Ship 0.36
28 Wedding / Naming / Bells 2.21
29 Snow or Alles ist klar 1.27
30 Centuries 1.18
31 Crux Australis - Te Paki o Autahi - Southern Cross 2.16
32 Dante's 'heaven' 0.36
33 'We are all newcomers' 3.49
34 Our Paradise 0.50
35 'Naked ladies' near Otama Beach, Coromandel Peninsula 2.02
36 A pukeko's trip south 1.40
37 Swimming 0.55
38 Bowl spoon table 0.44
39 Best friends 1.41
40 A childhood secret 1.16
41 Glance 0.22
42 On news of a poet's death: I II IV 3.26
43 Someone kissed me 0.54
44 E la selva oscura, non c'e? 0.49
45 He reads his poem aloud 0.43
46 Being Beatrice 0.35
47 Beatus 1.36
48 crossing fields 0.41
49 Swiss apple 0.42
50 Cornish hymn 1.19
51 On Shepherd's Hill 1.17
52 Blasted harvest 1.15
53 Millet's L'Angelus 1.00
54 Red Lamp 1.18
55 Sue sewing 1.03
56 Chronoclocking 0.44
Total length of the recording 72.04
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