KATE CAMP was born in Wellington in 1972. Her first collection of poetry, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (1998) won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her second volume, Realia, was published by Victoria University Press in 2001. She was the University of Waikato writer-in-residence for 2002. Camp has also contributed to the Montana Essay Series in 2002 with an essay entitled ‘On Kissing’.

Camp comments: ‘In 2002, while I was Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, I wrote a series of poems about a woman who is an insomniac. Maybe I was tempting fate, as I’ve always been an excellent sleeper. I think it was just a way of writing about a kind of inner night, a place of darkness and privacy.

‘As it is in many of my poems, the detail here is pretty autobiographical. The house is the cottage I lived in in Hamilton. Living inland, the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures can be extreme. I would lie in bed at night listening to the sounds of the house as it cooled off.’

 

Poem: The Insomniac Learns a Lot