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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. [Volume 39, Number 19, 1976.]

Against the Softness of Woman:

Against the Softness of Woman:

Jan Kemp.

Coweman Press, Dunedin. $3.20 Pbk $4.50 Hbk

This book is called "Against the Softness of Woman", the title of the first poem, and I presume that it was chosen because this poem is the keynote of the collection. If so, it seems an appropriate choice, because this poem says something about being a woman, and by extension a woman poet. That seems to me to be reflected in all her poetry.

The poem's message to women is: don't act like a woman: "don't let the quick spring flow/hide it behind." Women, she says, are prone to "vacillation", they are "vagrant".

A man, on the other hand, "has bared himself translucent/like the rings of honesty", "He has paved down his spare image." If a woman wants to be more like a man she should "let his singularity teach (her)", she should "become like him."

This is of course an anti-woman poem. Certainly many women, including women poets, whose talents are respected in the male world have chosen this path of survival; to deny their woman-ness, except, if they're "liberated" types, to fuck with men.

However the time has now come for many women - and women poets - when they now feel it is possible for them to "let the quick spring flow": to speak in their own voices.

However I rarely got the feeling from Jan Kemp's poems that she is speaking in her own voice. She gives the impression of posing, in each poem, for carefully taken, "artistic" photographs: the Poet and her Lover; the Poet talks to a Railway Guard; the Poet at the Poet's Funeral. Similarly, her technique often seems studied and "Poetic", without the guts of the experience described to give the forms and metaphors a kick.

An example is the poem "the Begonia House". In many ways the body of the poem seems merely a lead-up from the title to the somehow expected "unexpected" last two lines:

"we forgot to look
at begonias."

Her choice of words and punctuation too often seems unduly mannered; she favours, for no clear reason at all, the use of / as punctuation, for instance:

"the shell on your ear
is the sea/cochlea beach
of the whorled ellc horn fern..."

She uses commas too so this does not replace it; why not just finish the dash comes? And why use the spelling "masque" in the title "Balloon Masque": the poem makes it clear that she does mean a mask, not a masque.

This is a frustrating book of poems. Every now and then there is a flash of real communication, a sense of a real live person behind. For instance she exuberantly expresses happiness in fucking that

"makes us hustle
& lick the world
& our own
ice cream faces."

Personally, I wouldn't buy this book. I might get it out of the library though. But what good is it to a woman, or a poet, and expecially a woman poet if she won't "let the quick spring flow."

Deborah Jones