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: Black ice & the love planet (2021)

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.



2. Nicholas Reid. "Something New:: “BONFIRES ON THE ICE” by Harry Ricketts ( Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “GIVING BIRTH TO MY FATHER” by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30.00)“DANCING HEART” by Jan Kemp (published by Tranzlit, Germany); “IF WE KNEW HOW TO WE WOULD” by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24.99)." Reid's Reader - A Blog of Book Reviews and Comment (17/11/2025):
   

   The first 32 pages are new poems called “Dancing Heart.” In these, there is an acute awareness of becoming older, and some of her first poems in this selection say so. Thus the poem “Forest burial” wherein “We’ll sink before AI / is rife, we’ll have / known human lives. / And human love”. And in the poem “Shedding” she tells us it is “Time soon to start shedding” and giving things away. The poem “Crater” begins “A Week ago / on the crater’s edge / I looked down & saw / endless nothingness / & death”. But there is some hope in older age with poems about love and friendship and in one of her best poems “Anima mundi” she salutes the glories of nature where “I have my own cathedral here - / the nave-like path / leads through sunlit trees / where light filters / as through green, stained- glass windows.” Kemp often tries to work out some sort of belief. Could it be love itself? Or could she be trying to work out a sort of home-made religion? At any rate she sometimes quotes the Bible and wonders about it, as she did in some of her earlier collections where Dante often turned up. But she stoutly rejects any particular religion.
   
   ... there is every so often concern for the status of women, but she is more interested with intimacy, love, various countries, religion, beliefs and nature. Most important, she has the great merit of writing clearly and without the pretentious vocabulary that plagues many academics or younger poets.



3. Denys Trussell, "Thin Sheaves against Virtual Muses: Te Pūrere/The Exodus: The anthology of expatriate New Zealand poets edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas (Cold Hub Press, 2025), 205pp, $35; Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024 by Jan Kemp (Tranzlit, 2025), 172pp, n.p." The Landfall Tauraka Review: Aotearoa New Zealand Books in Review (March 2, 2026):
   

   Jan Kemp’s collection, Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024, edited and introduced by Jack Ross, very much fits the theme of expatriate poetry. A long-time resident of Germany, Kemp has spent much of her life away from the country of her birth, but she has maintained strong contacts, and was instrumental in establishing the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in 2004, an audio collection stored at the National Library.
   ...
   She moves in light, sure curvatures, as if in flight, through the phrasing, the junctures, the visible appearances the words might carry into a reader’s mind. Entering life by means of poetry becomes, for her, something that has created meaning and purpose throughout a life of largely self-exile. Her decision has been to stay in Europe, but to use poems to express a sense of distance and tension, feelings of being torn between places:

   I long for the sea,
   for islands
   even the Kea’s raw call,
   
   but love our Berg & Burg
   with its cobble-stoned wall.
   Now trim & as neat
   
   As a Hausfrau should be …

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"A Plinth for Buddha" - Jan Kemp in Werner Jaksch's garden (2026)

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The Landfall Tauraka Review

Complete Review:

Denys Trussell. "Thin Sheaves against Virtual Muses." The Landfall Tauraka Review - Aotearoa New Zealand Books in Review (3/3/2026)

Jan Kemp’s collection, Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024, edited and introduced by Jack Ross, very much fits the theme of expatriate poetry. A long-time resident of Germany, Kemp has spent much of her life away from the country of her birth, but she has maintained strong contacts, and was instrumental in establishing the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in 2004, an audio collection stored at the National Library. Born in 1949, Kemp was one of the younger poets involved in the years of ‘counter-culture’ here. These were responses to the anomalies of capitalism, conflict and colonialism, made highly visible by the Vietnam War. Radical feminism, ‘open’ poetics, a belief in a sexually liberated society, and in universal and indigenous rights resonate in the title Freed, a sporadic literary publication that became a point of focus among writers — Alan Brunton, Ian Wedde, Russell Haley, Murray Edmond, Stephen Chan, Jan Kemp and others — who were students at Auckland University.

Moving through this turbulence, Kemp developed a lyrical style — concise, sensitive and imagistic; a style that makes visible the space between objects and conveys a visual emphasis in a poem. This does not mean ideas and incident are absent. They are very much there, but they speak rather than declaim. This produces all that needs to be said in a small compass:

    We’ll sink before AI
    Is rife, we’ll have
    known human lives,
    And human love.
    
    ‘Forest Burial’

She has a self-confessed affinity with Emily Dickinson, expressed in her ‘Self Portrait’:

    I remind myself of Emily Dickinson
    locked in the attic of my thoughts.

I believe her empathy with Dickinson is based on more than introversion. She has a similar way of sensing a poem. I had already found, in Dickinson’s output (‘Poem 653’), lines that remind me of Kemp’s presence in her own poetry:

    Of Being is a Bird
    The likest to the Down
    An Easy Breeze do put afloat
    The general Heavens — upon —

She moves in light, sure curvatures, as if in flight, through the phrasing, the junctures, the visible appearances the words might carry into a reader’s mind. Entering life by means of poetry becomes, for her, something that has created meaning and purpose throughout a life of largely self-exile. Her decision has been to stay in Europe, but to use poems to express a sense of distance and tension, feelings of being torn between places:

    I long for the sea,
    for islands
    even the Kea’s raw call,

    but love our Berg & Burg
    with its cobble-stoned wall.
    Now trim & as neat

    As a Hausfrau should be …

    ‘The Kiwi in Me’

Dancing Heart begins with her most recent work, written as her husband became ill and then finally died in 2025. This subset contains some of her most accomplished poems — direct in expression, minimal in means. Among them is the six-line piece that titles the whole book:

    as your two heart-valves
    now don’t quite close,
    I’ll slip into that space
    & dance with you—
    so your heart will beat
    steadily & surely on …

This section ends with ‘Body Halo’:

    As I sat there
    I could feel
    his love all around me
    a body halo,
    warm & sweet
    as his skin, hair & breath
    when I hold him,
    my husband
    who found me,
    when I wasn’t looking

The collection then swings back to her Poems 1971–1974, beginning with the set’s title piece, ‘Against the Softness of Woman’. Written into a different world more than fifty years ago, it reveals a youth that nonetheless has sufficient judgement and will not indulge the narcissism of a lover:

    you were born to fit him
    to be his lay, his lie
    his way to run his way;
    when he has pared down his spare image
    don’t try to catch him
    you’ll catch yourself —

This ‘collected’ gives the impression that the shorter poem is her home territory, but she does lay out more extended works. There is her quietly satiric account of a literary château and its hostess at Lavigny in Switzerland. Jane Rosenthal Ledig Rowohlt (née Scatcherd) runs a ‘fin de siècle salon’ — the siècle in this case being the twentieth century. The ghosts of Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust hover. Mann’s The Magic Mountain, though, was a sanatorium, and fiction. Kemp’s is a real mountain Shangri-la, inhabited by writers lucky enough to be healthy, but not entirely free of the risks of fade-out in a culture in decline. Kemp’s title is a brilliant alteration of Proust: À la recherche de votre temps perdu — ‘In search of your lost time’. But Proust had no ‘votre’ in the title of his massive novel, making it clear thereby that it involves a universal nostalgia for a vanishing civilisation. However, Jane Rosenthal’s salon is real rather than fiction, and inclusive only of her own milieu. She has her virtues, but these are diminished by flaunted privilege — a fact of which Kemp is subtly aware:

                    Born in England
    grown up in France you thought Switzerland
    the perfect place for such homeless people
    as yourselves to settle. We do suit you — we whose
    home is words.

By contrast, Kemp can turn her home of words to quite different account. Her ‘Street-Sleeper, Hong Kong’ shows life stripped of the slightest privilege or hope:

    His limbs are sticks and twigs.
    His body is the tree of life.
    He is fruit and flower of a hard city.
    He did not make the top branches.

In Germany she literally stumbles over its mid-twentieth-century history in the streets. ‘Stolpersteine’, or ‘Tripstones’, a poem she chose to write in English and German, tells of the plaques sunk into pavements naming the vanished of the Holocaust. She trips and learns:

    We’re missing
    this person. I read:

    Here lived
    Julius Grünebaum
    b. 1892
    deported
    Auschwitz
    Murdered 31.10.1943

Neither the tragedies of history nor nature spare the poet. This one does not flinch at setting down the bones of a human catastrophe. Nor does she withhold pathos, lamenting in ‘Great fish at Muriwai Beach’ the fate of seventy whales that stranded on the New Zealand coastline:

    where looters
    can’t even give the dignity
    of complete burial.

    What requiem did you sing,
    mighty herd
    what whale-talk, what music
    sang in your minds
    as you followed maps
    forged more ancient in you
    than the land you struck
    instead of water?

In conclusion I would return to ‘Us’, a poem that brings her back to the self, involved in the riddle and enigma of love. We are Us, and so included in the meanings of the words:

    These bodies
    we lie in
    return us
    to our simplest selves.

    Loving, can you tell
    who’s who?
  

Denys Trussell

Denys Trussell is a poet, biographer, musician and environmentalist. The author of many books, he won the 1985 PEN Best First Book Award for non-fiction with Fairburn, a book about the life of poet A.R.D. Fairburn. He lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

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