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How To Be Happy Though Human New And Selected PoemsStock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionA timely collection of new and previously published work by one of Aotearoa’s most acclaimed poets, How to Be Happy Though Human is Kate Camp’s superb seventh book of poetry. Kate Camp’s poetry has been described by critics as ‘fearless’, ‘wry, sympathetic, affable, deadpan’, and ‘containing a surprising radicalism and power’. ‘When I yell at North Americans about how we, too, should be reading the living poets of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Kate Camp is one of the poets I have in mind. She’s one of the poets, too, who’s so amazing because she doesn’t yell: she’s patient with the world and with its seagulls, attentive to the injustice and the kindness and the frustration we can share with one another, if we’re lucky, anyway. What if Elizabeth Bishop had more friends, and more encouragement early on? What if “sports fields built on rubbish dumps” became safe places to play? What if, in an exquisite pun, we could see “cranes like cranes”? Here are the land and the sea, the children and the grownups too, both as they are and as we wish they could be: here is “the so-called outside world”, and here is its wonderfully sensitive, fluently understated poet, “absolutely fluent . . . yet somewhat on fire”. —Stephanie Burt Poet, essayist and reviewer Kate Camp was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington. She is the winner of many prestigious awards, including the 2011 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency and the 2017 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. |