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 HbkThis 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.
"we forgot to look
at begonias."
"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