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.

Contents:

Introduction

New Poems:

Dancing Heart: Poems 2019–2024

epigraph
1. dancing heart
together & apart

2. Black matter
3. Coping with male anger
4. Dante & a surplus star
5. Forest burial
6. Shedding
7. Crater
family & friends

8. A little red port left
9. A poem for AWJ
10. A poem for Franz
11. A poem to Leila who fell down a mountain
12. Christmas Lily
13. Gattopardo – Leopard
14. Little Dot
15. Mustn’t miss anything
16. True love
nature & the world

17. Angels
18. Anima mundi
19. Cantor
20. Creation
21. God, the Holy Ghost
22. Lounge lizard
23. The Nile
24. You can’t rely on snow to stay where it is
25. White paradise
26. The casino at Nice
27. Sipping Sav after Samarkand …
sequences

28. A triptych at Pentecost
    • Daily
    • Prayer
    • Truce
29. Chimera – a song cycle
    • I – Eastern Wall
    • II – A gift to the gods
    • III – A chased love
    • IV – Jeremiah, his book
    • V – You silly goose
    • VI – Pact
30. Magpie
postscript

31. body halo

Selected Poems:






from Against the Softness of Woman: Poems 1971–1974


32. Against the softness of woman
33. Mad Sally
34. Poem (for RAK Mason)
35. A pattern of loving
36. Candy Floss – Sky flyer
37. Cadences on green
38. Words were whispers
39. Seal to the sea-captain
40. Satori
41. Puriri
42. Poem
43. Old railway guard






from Diamonds and Gravel: Poems 1975–1978


44. Great fish at Muriwai Beach
45. In golden smock, walking
46. Tugboats
47. Timing
48. Nocturne
49. How far is it to Haadyai?
50. Down the first road
51. “When the wild goose finds food …”
52. The prince
53. Cockcrow
54. Swifts
55. Turkey talk






from The Other Hemisphere: Poems 1980–1990


56. Into that space
57. Chagall Windows, Fraumünster, Zürich
58. At Stonehenge
59. Looking at St. Paul’s
60. A grim tale
61. Walking a beach
62. To my father, M.H.K.
63. Atalanta
64. If you’re my friend for life
65. Street sleeper, Hong Kong
66. At Anawhata i-iv
67. Moon mad
68. Goddesses
69. The dance of hemispheres
70. The phoenix in my palm
71. The mermaid
72. Self portrait






from The Sky’s Enormous Jug: Love Poems 1968–1998


73. Woman sings
74. Redhead
75. Camellia pink
76. Us
77. Stone
78. The sky’s enormous jug
79. Return
80. Archive
81. Professor Dietrich on the Dachstein






from Only One Angel: Poems 1991–2001


82. The Ballad of Donna Quixote
83. Seventh Floor, Flat A
84. My heart is a columbarium
85. ‘One loses privacy with a woman in love’
86. Chemin des Serres de la Madone
87. Snow or alles ist klar
88. Rain
89. Elephant riding
90. Gold ring
91. The silence
92. The terrible angel
93. Pilgrims






from Dante’s Heaven: Poems 1999–2005


94. Dante’s ‘heaven’
95. Glance
96. Sailing boats
97. The past present/s
98. A childhood secret
99. Swimming
100. Nikau at Punakaiki
101. Love is a babe …
102. E la selva oscura, non c’è?
103. Jousting
104. Beatus






from Voicetracks: Poems 2002–2012


105. À la recherche de votre temps perdu …
106. Red lamp
107. crossing fields
108. Cornish hymn
109. Dalí, past it?
110. Goethe in Italy
111. Vindobono, Vienna
112. Plötzensee, Berlin
113. blasted harvest
114. A plinth for Buddha
115. Dancer
116. Stolpersteine / Tripstones
117. Jennet’s poem: wild love
118. The place of the dead
119. Golden Week, Kyoto
120. Dream






from Black Ice & the Love Planet: Poems 2012–2019


121. The Kiwi in me
122. On the Mayor of Wellington’s proposal …
123. An Albanian cellist in Viktoria Park
124. Stork, cuckoo, lark
125. Spring death
126. Black ice
127. Feather
128. Roses
129. Will you dance with me?
130. Venus and the Organ Player
131. Communion at Pentecost
132. Leftie

Notes & Acknowledgments

•
Jan Kemp (2012)

Available:

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

•
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) [www.aonzpsa.blogspot.com]. 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 [www.tranzlit.de] & 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.

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Jan Kemp: Against the Softness of Woman (1976)

Reviews & Comments:

1. The Sunday Poem by Jan Kemp, "Lines on a Severed Friendship." Newsroom (August 10, 2025):
   
   
   Jan Kemp on the autobahn by bus, en route home from Innsbruck (July 2015)

   Christmas Lily
   
   to Jeny Curnow (1931–2013)
   
   I’ll never know why the Christmas lily she gave us grew.
   After eight years, she severed her friendship
   with not even a knife-like you no longer amuse.
   It was hot irritation. But how she’d always treasure
   the gone good times. Well, you do grow up.
   I’d sworn to her everlastingly out of pity at her
   biggest loss. Now that’s all so, like anything
   that comes to pass.
   
   But how, this late October
   does a Christmas lily come to me to pot, re-pot,
   put in the light to bring white pods of
   pure flower up from the dung? She is now
   something, a teaspoon, I could pick up or leave
   lying absently near my cup. But a lily is insistent &
   shows its love. Is it that she or I may yet forgive?
   

   Taken with kind permission from the newly published (in Berlin) limited edition of 80 copies (156 pages, 230gms in weight) Dancing Heart: Poems 2019–2024 by Jan Kemp, with an Introduction by Jack Ross (Tranzlit, $35), available via the author by emailing her on jantranzlit@gmail.com. The price covers post and packaging from Germany.

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Jan Kemp: Black ice & the love planet (2021)

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