Only One Angel: Poems

by Jan Kemp

Jan Kemp is a poet of the Big Smoke generation. After many years of living overseas, mainly in Asia, this is her first collection of new work since 1991. It extends the themes and preoccupations of her previous volume with her distinctive female sensibility and language that is deceptively simple. The poems sound good to the ear and are a pleasure to read. The volume, illustrated by Claudia Pond Eyley, is loosely gathered around the theme of a personal journey towards an intimate relationship. Widely disparate experiences - intellectual, artistic, spiritual, sensual - are brought together with clarity, honesty and wit.

60 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

About the author

Jan Kemp 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.

Working with Jack Ross, Kemp edited Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (2006) which includes 27 of New Zealands most celebrated poets reading their works in more than two hours of recordings. Since then, she has edited two further collections with Jack Ross of poetry in performance, entitled Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2007) and New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2008)

Jan Kemp reading from her poems was released in 2008 by The Poetry Archive, U.K. Samples of her poems can be heard and read on their website: www.poetryarchive.org.

Kemp is a long-standing member of the NZ Society of Authors (PEN), and since she moved to Germany in 2007, has become a member of PEN-Germany.