Kate Camp 

Friday 23 August 7.30-10pm  once and for all
Sunday 25 August 2.15 – 3.45pm hearts and minds/minds and bodies

Kate Camp was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington, NZ. She is a poet, prose writer and reviewer. Her first collection of poetry, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of  Poetry at the 1999 The Montana NZ Book Awards, and was highly praised by reviewers. 

Kate Camp is literate yet hip, culturally attuned and funky... This poet skips easily through various fields of reference, medical, economic, anthropological, literary, pop-culture, collecting and bringing home specimens as good poets do... If her first collection is this good, what will the second be like?
(Cath Kenneally, Landfall)

Her poems have appeared in magazines and journals including Landfall, New Zealand Books, North and South, NZ Listener, Sport, Takahe and the Sunday Star Times 2000AD magazine. She is a regular reviewer on Kim Hill’s National Radio programme and a columnist for The Evening Post.

Realia, Kate’s second collection of poetry, was published in July 2001 by Victoria University Press. Kate was appointed Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato in 2002. 

One of her poems "Unfinished Love Theorem" was selected for the online collection Best NZ Poems 2001.

while you are talking
I am planning

what to say
when you stop

I turn words around
can’t quite get it right

we are all speakers of other languages
dialects of accidental harshness

ways of failing
to be understood

an d it’s a well-known fact
that the grammar of sadness

is fiendishly difficult
full of rules, and exceptions to rules

full of except
only when, and if

so forgive me, I can only say
it is a beautiful castle

my leg is broken
and that is very expensive

from Realia, Victoria UP, 2001.

© Kate Camp

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Last updated 11 July, 2002