Ordinary Moving

by Penn Kemp

This collection is an antidote of JOY to all the overwhelm! ORDINARY / MOVING is a memoir in verse. Perceptions from early childhood are for me best expressed in poetry, as the senses are so acute then and the imagery intense. A child’s perspective fascinates me as it is fresh and original, unencumbered as yet by expectations. These poems present a childhood begun during WW2, moving through the staid Fifties, and into the (in)famous Sixties… raising kids in the Seventies… and skipping ahead to my own Seventies, watching grandchildren. The poems articulate the momentous shifts in consciousness that these decades offered. The London Ontario artistic scene in which I grew up was an exciting foment of new ideas. My father, an abstract painter, was very involved, and so art was my milieu. Adjusting to social mores at school was something else.
Penn Kemp

“How lovely to see this talented and prolific poet performing at the top of her game at age 80! These are golden poems, brief glimpses of a long life in love and sorrow and art, threaded together with courage and bravado and the kind of gentle Celtic-inspired wisdom we have come to expect in Penn Kemp’s work. There are echoes of early Margaret Atwood and late Dorothy Livesay, but transmuted into wide poetic gestures of unusual generosity, empathy, simplicity, community, and kindness.”
Di Brandt, author of The Sweetest Dance on Earth: New and Selected Poems

"Ordinary / Moving is enormously readable and inviting, full of warmth and insight, humour and humility, story and song. The grief poem for the author's stepdaughter, for example, is absolutely wrenching. And salving. I could hardly read it, and yet at the end I was -- not comforted, not restored – but somehow re-balanced. Wonderful. A true gift." Susan McMaster, author of Grounded (Black Moss)

72 pages, Paperback

Published March 7, 2025

About the author

Penn Kemp received the League of Canadian Poets Inaugural Lifetime Achievemnt Award, 2025. She has been an energetic presence in poetry circles since her first publication in 1972. London’s first Poet Laureate, Penn is a keen participant in Canada’s cultural life, with 30+ books of poetry, prose and drama; seven plays and multimedia galore. See Substack, Facebook, Instagram, X, www.pennkemp.weebly.com and www.pennkemp.wordpress.com.

Reviews

[Penn Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these strikingly rich poems, Penn Kemp filters her life story as well as that of her family through the lens of ordinary movements. Many-layered, common motions chronicling childhood games such as skipping rope and skating, some movements mastered and others not, are highly relatable to anyone who has failed to Shoot the Duck in skating and been ousted from ballet class. This reader empathizes on both counts. Rich in word play, onomatopoeia and metaphor, these poems describe the universal experience of coming of age, finding one's forte, grieving the loss of loved ones and finely balancing family dynamics. Kemp's uncanny juxtapositions reveal her particular genius and wry wit: down the classical halls of Latin and Linnaeus, she shudders at Biology's task of dissecting a pigeon. (A Convoluted Etymology of the Course Not Taken), playing on Frost's poem “The Road Not Taken”.

Kemp's favour to her father, gessoing his blank canvases, becomes a poetic manifesto where she waits for words to arise on blank white paper with their own character and personality/ ready to burst off the page and into life. (Translation). Calling herself Penn, not Penny, Kemp lives her poetry. Divided in to five parts, the poems carry the reader on a familial, compassionate, heartwarming and heartrending journey through life as we move through our own. The eponymous final poem, with its subtle wordplay, completes the lifespan into an ongoing motion that encapsulates what all of us seekers desire, and is quoted in full: Ordinary. Moving // the seasonal / cyclic completion / into another the next / with joy // trepidation and / dread, we / anticipate another // winsome / lose some, // looking for wisdom.

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell, author of Familiar and Forgiveness and Holy in My Nature.