Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart (2025)

Design: John Denny

Jan Kemp. Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems 1968–2024. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-3-00-083163-8. Kronberg im Taunus, Germany: Tranzlit, 2025. 172 pp.

I've just this morning received my co-author's copies of this, Jan Kemp's latest collection - a selection I made last year from her poetry to date. And here we both are on the back cover: snapped at an unguarded moment in the Senior Common Room of Auckland Uni during Jan's latest visit to New Zealand.

Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart (2025)

Blurb:

Jan Kemp MNZM & Dr Jack Ross first worked together 20 years ago creating the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004). Since then Jan has published three poetry collections, Dante’s Heaven (Puriri Press, 2007) which became Dante Down Under (English/German) (2017), and Black Ice & the Love Planet (English/German) (2020), both from Tranzlit & Tripstones (Puriri Press, 2020), as well as the two memoirs Raiment (Massey University Press, 2022) and To see a World (Tranzlit, 2023). She lives with her husband Dieter Riemenschneider in Kronberg im Taunus, Germany, where she sings in a choir, presents poetry & music performances and walks in its parks.

Jack, too, has published three poetry collections since 2004: To Terezín (Massey University, 2007); A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014 (HeadworX, 2014), and The Oceanic Feeling (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2020); as well as Celanie (Pania Press, 2012), a collaboration with artist Emma Smith, which includes a translation of Paul Celan’s poems to his wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. He was also managing editor of Poetry NZ (now Poetry Aotearoa) from 2014 to 2020. He lives in Mairangi Bay, on Auckland’s North Shore, with his wife, crafter, curator and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd.

None of that tells you very much about the book itself, though. I've written some comments on Jan's previous collection, Tripstones, here. That, too, was a selection from already published poems, but it was meant as a short, limited-edition sampler from her longtime publisher Puriri Press rather than a genuine attempt to do justice to the scope and scale of her work to date.

Jan's nine poetry collections to date contain, by my estimate, 355 poems, composed over a period of roughly fifty years. All of them could all be fitted in one book, I suppose, but it would have to be a pretty massive tome. We therefore decided, when discussing the idea of a collected / selected edition of her poetry, to compromise on presenting a set of new, unpublished poems alongside a selection from her earlier books.

As I say in my introduction to Dancing Heart:

Each one of these books is a thing of beauty. They speak to the typefaces and design features of a particular epoch: the ampersands and back-slashes of the 1970s, the florid exuberance of the early 2000s.

Here's a gallery of covers to make the point:

•
Jan Kemp: Against the Softness of Woman (1976)

Jan Kemp: Diamonds and Gravel (1979)

Jan Kemp: The Other Hemisphere (1991)

Jan Kemp: The Sky’s Enormous Jug (2001)

Jan Kemp: Only One Angel (2001)

Jan Kemp: Dante’s Heaven (2006)

Jan Kemp: Voicetracks (2012)

Jan Kemp: Tripstones (2020)

Jan Kemp: Black ice & the love planet (2020)


•

As I go on to say in my introduction:

I suppose if I had to play favourites, it would have to be for the meticulously designed and produced volumes created by John Denny at the Puriri Press in Auckland. The Sky’s Enormous Jug, with its delicate hand-binding and sumptuous illustrations, is a particular pleasure to leaf through. Dante’s Heaven, too, is a wonderful piece of book-art.

I'm very happy to report that John Denny has come out of retirement to design this new collection as a special favour to Jan.

What else? If you'd like to preview the table of contents and find out more information about the book, please go here. If you'd like to read my introduction in full, you can go here. There's a sample poem, "Christmas Lily", available here at Newsroom.

And if you're interested in ordering a copy, this is the address to write to:

Available:

Tranzlit
Bahnhofstrasse 16a
61476 Kronberg im Taunus
Germany
www.tranzlit.de
E: jantranzlit@gmail.com

RRP: $NZ35 [incl. postage & packing]

I hope you'll have as much fun reading the book as we did in putting it together. It involved digitising, collating, and selecting from all of Jan's books - a task we've both had to work hard on over the past year - but it was definitely worth it. As I say in my introduction:

As I look at my set of her books to date, including all nine of her poetry collections, published between 1976 and 2020, they seem like a time capsule of New Zealand writing over the past five decades.

In the end, though:

if it’s to live, your work does have to end up belonging to others.
Jan has understood this, and her lifetime of poetry writing, reading, performing and teaching has – in my view at least – resulted in a truly wonderful body of work, which I believe richly deserves to catch fire in the minds of new readers as well as the memories of already established fans.

Jan Kemp: Raiment: A Memoir (2022)

•
Jan Kemp (2012)

Janet Mary Riemenschneider-Kemp MNZM
(1949- )

Books I own are marked in bold:

Poetry collections:


1. Against the Softness of Woman (1976)
   • Against the Softness of Woman. Dunedin: Caveman Press, 1976.
2. Diamonds and Gravel (1979)
   • Diamonds and Gravel. Wellington: Hampson Hunt, 1979.
3. The Other Hemisphere (1991)
   • The Other Hemisphere. 1991. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1992.
4. The Sky’s Enormous Jug – love poems old and new (2001)
   • The Sky’s Enormous Jug – love poems old and new. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2001.
5. Only One Angel (2001)
   • Only One Angel. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001.
6. Dante’s Heaven (2006)
   • Dante’s Heaven. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2006.
   • Dante Down Under / Gedichte aus Aotearoa/Neuseeland. 2006. Trans. Dieter Riemenschneider. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2017.
   • Dante's Heaven / Il Cielo di Dante. 2006. Trans. Aldo Magagnino. Poggio Imperiale: Edizioni del Poggio, 2017.
7. Voicetracks: Poems 2002-2012 (2012)
   • Voicetracks: Poems 2002-2012. Auckland: Puriri Press / Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2012.
8. Tripstones: A Selection of Poems (2020)
   • Tripstones: A Selection of Poems. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2020.
9. Black Ice & the Love Planet (2020)
   • Black Ice & the Love Planet: Poems 2012-2019 / Glatteis & der Planet der Liebe: Gedichte 2012-2019. Trans. Susanne Opfermann & Helmbrecht Breinig. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2020.
   • Black Ice & the Love Planet: Poems 2012-2019 / Ghiaccio Nero & il Pianeta dell'Amore: Poesie 2012-2019. Trans. Aldo Magagnino. Poggio Imperiale: Edizioni del Poggio, 2021.
10. Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems. Ed. Jack Ross (2025)
    • Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems 1968–2024. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-3-00-083163-8. Kronberg im Taunus, Germany: Tranzlit, 2025.

Chapbooks & Features:


11. [Contributor] The Young New Zealand Poets. Ed. Arthur Baysting. Auckland: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973.
12. [Contributor] Private Gardens: An Anthology of New Zealand Women Poets. Ed. Riemke Ensing. Afterword by Vincent O'Sullivan. Dunedin: Caveman Publications Ltd., 1977.
13. [Featured Poet] Climate 29: A Journal of New Zealand and Australian Writing (Autumn 1979). Ed. Alistair Paterson. Auckland, 1979.
14. Ice Breaker Poems. Drawings by Anthony Stones. Auckland: Coal-Black Press, 1980.
15. Five Poems. Singapore: National Museum Art Gallery, 1988.
16. Nine Poems from Le Château de Lavigny. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.
17. Jennet's poem: wild love. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2012.
18. [Featured Poet] Poetry NZ 48 (2014). Ed. Nicholas Reid. Auckland: Puriri Press / Palm Springs, California: Brick Row, March 2014.

Prose:


19. Spirals of Breath: Short Stories & Novellas. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2020.
20. Raiment. Memoirs, 1. Auckland: Massey University Press, 2022.
21. To See a World. Memoirs, 2. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2024.

Edited:


22. [with Jonathan Lamb & Alan Smythe] New Zealand Poets Read Their Work. 3 LPs. Auckland: Waiata Records, 1974.
23. [with Jack Ross] Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance [with 2 CDs]. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006.
24. [with Jack Ross] Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance [with 2 CDs]. Auckland: Auckland University Press,, 2007.
25. [with Jack Ross] New New Zealand Poets in Performance [with 2 CDs]. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008).
26. [with Dieter Riemenschneider] Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland (English-German). Kronberg: Tranzlit, 2010.

•

Jan Kemp: To See a World: A Memoir (2024)

Euhemerism

Tim Severin: The Jason Voyage (1985)

Tim Severin. The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece. Drawings by Tróndur Patursson. Photographs by John Egan, Seth Mortimer and Tom Skudra. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1985.

The other day I picked up a rather handsome secondhand copy of Tim Severin's book The Jason Voyage for a trifling sum. I wasn't actually planning on reading it right away, but somehow it grabbed my attention and diverted me from all the other odds and ends - biographies, short story collections, graphic novels - I'm working my way through at the moment.

I remember seeing a documentary about the making of Severin's replica twenty-oar Bronze Age galley the Argo some years ago, and it was interesting to compare that to the rather more contextual approach to the myth he takes here.

Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautica (2014)

Apollonius of Rhodes. The Voyage of Argo. Trans. E. V. Rieu. 1959. Rev. ed. 1972. Introduction by Lawrence Norfolk. Illustrations by Daniel Egnéus. London: The Folio Society, 2014.

After a while I thought I should check on the critical response to some of Severin's more audacious claims about the original voyage of the Argonauts, and found the following review on the Goodreads site, contributed by a certain Koen Crolla (29/10/2020):

... Tim Severin spent much of the '70s and '80s and other people's money recreating some historic boat journeys; in this case, that of Jason and the Argonauts, from Iolcus (now Volos in Greece) to Colchis (now Georgia)...
The book covers everything from the construction of the replica Argo in Greece to their successful arrival in Poti, (Soviet) Georgia, and, in the epilogue, their engine-powered return, but Severin is neither a classicist nor an archaeologist, so many of the more interesting detail [sic.] are skipped over: you'll find plenty of anecdotes illustrating the boat-builder's personality, for example, but few details regarding the construction of the ship itself, and none at all regarding the archaeological basis of the design.
During the journey itself, too, Severin's thoughts on the Argonautica range far beyond what conscientious euhemerism will actually allow, with every coincidence becoming a confirmation of the definite historical fact of Jason and everything he encounters. It doesn't help that Severin's knowledge of Bronze Age Greece is rudimentary at best and tainted by Gimbutasian nonsense ... but some of the blame surely falls on two archaeologists (Vasiliki Adrimi in Greece and Othar Lordkipanidze in (Soviet) Georgia) for filling this gullible oaf's head with nonsense.
Still, things are such that even dodgy experimental archaeology often yields useful results, and if you ignore everything Severin writes about landmarks that are definitely 100% the locations mentioned in the Argonautica, there's still actual information left about the feasibility of crossing the open sea and rough currents in a crappy galley, even with doughy and/or middle-aged rowers — even if Severin is enough of a narcissist that large swathes of his account are clearly unreliable. (At least National Geographic took a lot of pictures.)
And though the write-up is kind of a lost opportunity, it's still decent entertainment; I would have liked to have been one of the crew.

Tim Severin: Rowers in the Bosphorus (1985)

How surprising that they didn't think to invite Mr. (or is it Dr?) Crolla to accompany them! His lively good humour would have left the whole crew in stitches, I'm sure - especially that little side-swipe at the "doughy and/or middle-aged rowers" Severin enlisted to help him. Not according to the photos he included of their sinewy bodies toiling at the oars - talk about "sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows" (Tennyson, "Ulysses") ...

There were a couple of other points of interest in Koen Crolla's review, though. First of all, there was that intriguing word "euhemerism," which I must confess was new to me. Not any more, though:

Euhemerus of Sicily (fl. 4th century BCE)

Euhemerism:

is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhemerism supposes that historical accounts become myths as they are exaggerated in the retelling, accumulating elaborations and alterations that reflect cultural mores. It was named after the Greek mythographer Euhemerus ... In the more recent literature of myth ... euhemerism is termed the "historical theory" of mythology.

Tim Severin: The Jason Voyage (map)

Well, there you go. You learn something new every day. That really is a perfect description of Severin's diegetic method. Nary a rock or a headland can be glimpsed without his pointing out how perfectly it matches Apollonius's description in the Argonautica: an epic poem composed in the 3rd century BCE, roughly a thousand years after the actual events of the original voyage are supposed to have taken place.

I was also intrigued by Crolla's side-reference to "Gimbutasian nonsense." Again, this was not an adjective familiar to me, but I presume it refers to Marija Gimbutas:

a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.

Marija Gimbutienė: Lithuanian postage stamp (2021)

The "Kurgan hypothesis" turns out, on investigation, to be a fairly well-regarded theory about the origins of the proto-Indo-European (or "Aryan", as they used to be called) languages in an area north of the Black Sea. What I think Crollas must be referring to, though, is her later work:

Gimbutas gained fame and notoriety in the English-speaking world with her last three English-language books: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974); The Language of the Goddess (1989) ... and the last of the three, The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), which, based on her documented archaeological findings, presented an overview of her conclusions about Neolithic cultures across Europe: housing patterns, social structure, art, religion, and the nature of literacy.
The Goddess trilogy articulated what Gimbutas saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered goddess- and woman-centered (gynocentric), and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal ("androcratic") culture which supplanted it. According to her interpretations, gynocentric (or matristic) societies were peaceful, honored women, and espoused economic equality. The androcratic, or male-dominated, Kurgan peoples, on the other hand, invaded Europe and imposed upon its natives the hierarchical rule of male warriors.

Aha! The penny drops. I'm certainly familiar with all the ideological battles over whether or not there ever was an ancient, peaceful woman-centred culture in Europe which was supplanted by the incursion of violent, male-dominated, warrior tribes. Once again, one point up to Crolla, though his reference to Severin as a "gullible oaf" still seems a little uncalled for.

•

Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage (1987)

Tim Severin. The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey. Drawings by Will Stoney. Photographs by Kevin Fleming, with Nazem Choufeh and Rick Williams. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987.

It isn't really the voyage of the Argonauts that's the problem, though. It's the Odyssey.

After rowing his painstakingly constructed galley through the Aegean and across into the Black Sea to reenact the Argonautica, the second part of Severin's master-plan clicked into action. Now he would attempt to sail the same boat from Troy, on the coast of Asia Minor, to the island of Ithaka, in order to chart the much-vexed Odysseus's difficult ten-year journey home.

Here's one of the standard interpretations of this voyage:

The Route of Odysseus

And here's Tim Severin's own route from Troy all the way to the Ionian sea, as navigated (for the most part) by his own Trojan-war-era galley:

Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage (map 1)

And here's an overview of his blueprint for the entire voyage:

Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage (map 2)

Both versions agree on a side-trip to North Africa, and a long haul back from there. The difference, however, is that the earlier version has Odysseus's 12-ship flotilla blown all the way down the coast to Tunisia, whereas Severin calculates that the ships must have battened down and furled their sails and thus made landfall far further east, in Libya.

Severin therefore postulates a much shorter trip back to Greece, followed by some cruising around the island of Crete, whereas the other theory has Odysseus landing in Sicily, followed by excursions to the Balearic islands - possibly even as far as the Pillars of Hercules!

Odysseus consulting the shade of Tiresias

Which of these two routes sounds more plausible to you: the one Severin actually sailed in his own boat, or the one dreamed up by desk-bound scholars measuring distances on the map?

Here are a few of the problems I foresee arising from any attempt to answer this question:

1. It presupposes that there was once a person called Odysseus / Ulysses
2. It assumes that he took part in the Trojan War
3. And also that there was an actual, historical "Trojan war"
4. It also takes for granted that legitimate, topographically precise details of his journey home can be gleaned from the Odyssey, a poem probably written around the 8th or 7th century BCE, about a war which took place at least 4-500 years earlier, around the 12th or 13th century BCE
5. There are further assumptions built into it about the poet we refer to as "Homer", who may (or may not) have been the "author" - whatever precisely we mean by that, in a predominantly oral Bardic culture - of both the Odyssey as well as the Iliad
6. And isn't it just a little bit problematic that the one fact all accounts of Homer agree on is that he was blind? Could he really have been the keen yachtsman and ocean swimmer postulated at certain points in Severin's narrative?

Do I need to go on? Without wanting to be a spoilsport about it, I feel that we need at least a few plausible answers to the questions above before we start debating if an obscure Cretan folktale about three-eyed cannibals may have given rise to the story of the Cyclops, or whether or not the Straits of Messina are too wide to have been the abode of Scylla and Charybdis.

Robert Graves: Homer's Daughter (1955)

Such speculations can be a lot of fun, mind you. I'm a big fan of Robert Graves' historical novels, one of which resuscitates Samuel Butler's hypothesis - from The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) - that the real maker of the Odyssey was a Sicilian woman, who employed well-known landmarks from her own island for most of its more famous incidents.

Graves has her casting herself as Nausicaä, while her hometown is forced to play double duty as both Phaeacia and Ithaka. The whole concludes with a massacre, just like the Odyssey itself.

Robert Graves: The Golden Fleece (1944)

And then there's his earlier novel The Golden Fleece [retitled "Hercules, My Shipmate" for the US market], which turns the whole quest into a "Gimbutasian" struggle between Goddess worshippers and savage Apollonian invaders.

Or, as one of the more positive commentators on Goodreads puts it:

The Golden Fleece is an encyclopedic novel of all things Greek and pre-Greek. Graves incorporates or refers to many myths and legends, from the cosmogony through the trade war between Troy and Greece and the Twelve Labors of Hercules. And from various cultures, including Pelasgian, Cretan, Thracian, Colchian, Taurean, Albanian, Amazonian, Troglodyte, and of course Greek, he works into his novel many interesting customs, about fertility orgies, weddings, births, funerals, and ghosts; prayers, sacrifices, omens, dreams, and mystery cults; boar hunting, barley growing, trading, and ship building, sailing, and rowing; feasting, singing, dancing, story telling, and clothes wearing; boxing, murdering, warring, and treaty negotiating; and more. It all feels vivid, authentic, and strange.

In other words, there's no harm at all in reimagining and reinterpreting these old myths, as long as it's in the interests of sharpening our responses to the stories themselves - as well as the consummate works of literary art in which they've been preserved.

However, it's important to bear in mind that Apollonius of Rhodes was a scholar and librarian at the Library of Alexandria when he composed the Argonautica. Homer was - well, nobody really knows, but probably a Bard and performer of his own poems, in a possibly pre-literate culture. They were, in other words, completely different poets, from widely separate eras of Ancient Greek culture, who lived 500 years apart.

Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)

Try transposing these dates onto Le Morte d'Arthur, Malory's version of the Arthurian legends, published by William Caxton as one of the first printed books in English. The five and a half centuries between Malory and us should give you some idea of the actual distance in time between Homer and Apollonius.

If you extend the metaphor, and go back 1,000 years from Malory, you'll find yourself in the approximate era of the real King Arthur (if there ever was such a person). That gives you some idea of the gap between Apollonius and his own heroes, Jason's Argonauts.

Homer, by contrast, lived only 500-odd years later than his subject-matter, the siege of Troy (and its myriad dire consequences). Malory certainly could (and has been) used as a kind of guidebook to Arthurian Britain, but the more precise and "euhemeristic" these educed details become, the more absurd the whole project seems.

Geoffrey Ashe: The Traveller's Guide to Arthurian Britain (1997)

It'd be lovely to go back in a time machine and check out the facts for ourselves - though it might be a bit difficult to square the border region referred to in Hittite records as Taruisa (Troy?) or Wilusa (Greek "Wilios" or "Ilios") with the Troy of our imaginations.

Enterprises such as Severin's are certainly not futile. There is, however, little doubt that he tends to take an ahistorical, over-literal approach to both the textual and topographical details of the folktales that inspired his journeys. Whether or not this assists us in interpreting these myths, and the poems that embody them, is more debatable.

•

Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis [C. P. Cavafy] (1863-1933)

An alternative approach can be found in the work of the modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, who set out instead to remind us of the deep metaphorical significance of these legends for all of us - but particularly those who still inhabit those ancient lands today. Here's his great poem "Ithaka" (along with my own attempt at a version for contemporary travellers):

C. P. Cavafy: Ithaka (1911)

Ithaka


Before you set out for Ithaka
pray for a long itinerary
full of protracted stopovers.
Customs officials, Interpol,
the zombie Police Chief – not a problem:
as long as you keep your shit together,
staple a smile to your fat face,
they won’t be able to finger you.
Customs officials, Interpol,
the paparazzi, will look right through you
– unless you invite them up for a drink,
unless they’re already inside your head.

Pray for a long itinerary:
landing for the umpteenth time
on the tarmac of a third-world airport
at fiery psychedelic dawn;
haggling in the duty-frees
for coral necklaces and pearls,
designer scents & silks & shades,
as many marques as you can handle; 
visiting every provincial town,
sampling every drug & kick …

Never forget about Ithaka:
getting there is your destiny;
no need to rush – it’ll still be waiting
no matter how many years you take.
By the time you touch down you’ll be bone-tired,
happy with what you snapped in transit,
just a few daytrips left to do.
Ithaka shouted you the trip,
you’d never have travelled without her.
She’s got fuck-all to show you now.

Dirt-poor, dingy … she’s up front.
It’s over now; you’ve seen so much
there’s no need to tell you what Ithaka means.


(30/8-12/10/04)

Korina Cassianou: Odysseus of Ithaka (2011)

•