Kate Camp
Kate Camp is the author of five collections of poetry from Victoria University Press: Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (winner of Best First Book of Poetry in the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards), Realia, Beauty Sleep, The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (winner of the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry 2011), and Snow White's Coffin.
Snow White's Coffin was written while Camp held the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency in 2011/2012, and was shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry in 2013.
Camp comments: ‘This is one of a handful of poems in Snow White's Coffin that was written before I left for Berlin. It’s loosely based on a writing exercise that I first read in Mutes and Earthquakes. The exercise involves describing a scene you know very well, then writing about a family member, then combining the two. An earlier poem, “Another indecipherable postcard from my father”, from Beauty Sleep was written using the same exercise.
‘On reflection they have quite a bit in common. Both feature my father (who, incidentally, is still very much alive, despite the elegiac tone here). Both take as their scene the environs outside my front door―the first poem set in Hamilton where I was writer in residence, the second in Wellington. And both occur in the stillness of early morning.
‘This poem also owes a debt to The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Eavan Boland and Mark Strand. This is a wonderful source book for poets. Each chapter discusses a form, and includes close readings of examples from the form. I had read the chapter on elegy, which features Gray’s elegy, the morning I wrote this poem.’
