Raiment: A Memoir

Description

The engaging memoir of a pioneering seventies woman poet. Pioneering New Zealand poet Jan Kemp's memoir of her first 25 years is a vivid and frank account of growing up in the 1950s and of university life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It tracks from an innocent Waikato childhood to the seedy flats of Auckland, where anarchic student life, drugs, sexual experimentation and a failing marriage could not keep her away from poetry. She became one of the few young women poets of her era to be allowed into the then male poet club. Weaving its own patterns and colours, Raiment shines a clear-eyed light on the heady, hedonistic hothouse of our literary community in the 1970s and reveals what it took, back then, to be an independent woman.

Jan Kemp was born in Hamilton in 1949 and has an MA (Hons) in English, a Diploma of Teaching and an MNZM. A fourth-generation New Zealander, she lived and worked overseas for many years before settling in Germany. Kemp established the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, and co-edited, with Jack Ross, a series of New Zealand poets in performance. She is now writing new poems for her tenth collection the dancing heart. Together with a team of singers and readers, she has also produced a video Dante Down Under for Dante's 700th death year filmed in the Johanniskirche Kronberg, where she sings in the choir.