Published in 2022
256 pages
Jan Kemp MNZM is a poet and short fiction writer. She obtained a BA, trained as a teacher, then returned to the University of Auckland, graduating with an MA (Hons) in English in 1974. She spent three months in the South Pacific and left New Zealand again in 1976 to live and work abroad, including in Canada, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, before settling in 2008 in Germany. She has published many collections of poetry, established the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, and co-edited, with Jack Ross, a series of New Zealand poets in performance.
What is this book about?
Pioneering New Zealand poet Jan Kemp’s memoir of her first 25 years is a vivid and frank account of growing up in the 1950s, and of university life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It tracks from an innocent Waikato childhood to the seedy flats of Auckland, where anarchic student life, drugs, sexual experimentation, and a failing marriage could not keep her away from poetry. She became one of the few young women poets of her era to be allowed into the then male poet club. Weaving its own patterns and colours, Raiment shines a clear-eyed light on the heady, hedonistic hothouse of our literary community in the 1970s and reveals what it took, back then, to be an independent woman.
