What does it mean to “write like a girl”? While this may not be the underlying theme of Robin Kemp’s poetry collection, she does raise the question (in “The Lady Poets’ Auxiliary”) near the end of the book; and the placement of the piece suggests the reader may want to re-examine the preceding poems after having considered the implications of this sly ars poetica. But it is already clear that Kemp does not offer “ladylike” poems or sensibilities. Her work is often barbed; romance is neither easy nor always desirable, she doesn’t shy away from toughness, slang, or scientific reason. Maybe she isn’t writing “like a girl”—if we could define what that means—but she is clearly writing to be heard.

Kemp employs formal strategies frequently and appropriately, possessing a deft hand with the contemporary sound of the sonnet which she uses to good effect in lyric love poems....But she also uses form in current-events or politically-charged poems, where the structure and limitations of the sonnet, pantoum, etc. help to point out irony, even sarcasm,...the formality heightens the off-kilter sense of newsfeed immediacy.

"That off-kilter sense works well in This Pagan Heaven, and Kemp knows how to use classical allusions and classic forms to intensify rather than balance the tensions in the topics she explores."

Robin Kemp’s This Pagan Heaven (Pecan Grove Press, 2009) is a collection of twenty-five articulate, passionate, finely crafted poems. The book begins with eight sonnets, both Shakespearean and Italian, that follow a traditional rhyme scheme, but vary in meter. The formal skill displayed in the opening poems shows right away that Kemp has earned her poetry chops. Some of sonnets are about love and passion, traditional themes for this form, but others are metaphysical, in the tradition of John Donne. There’s one called “Pelican Sonnet,” with an epigram that says “who the hell writes a sonnet about a pelican?”

“Pelican Sonnet,” which depicts a speaker watching birds in flight “over the bayou’s mouth,” paves the way for the next series of poems in the book. Now the speaker allows her memory to flow. In the free-verse poem “Dreaming of Your Hair,” the speaker remembers a past lover in New Orleans. There are also poems about her parents and her childhood, full of images and details that explain the speaker’s current life as a poet. The pieces are autobiographical, examining the New Orleans of her past.

There are also poems with a political voice, such as “Pantoum for Ari Fleisher” and “Bodies.” “Bodies” is a lyric poem in eight sections that juxtaposes scenes from Kemp’s native New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Because Kemp is from New Orleans, she writes about the flood with an intimate knowledge of the victims and their losses. In “Editing Katrina” the speaker evokes her frustration and grief over the horrific scenes of her beloved city that she has seen only from the CNN news room (where Kemp was a journalist before her current life as a PhD candidate at Georgia State in Atlanta).

One of my favorite poems is the last one, “Red Moon,” a sonnet about a lunar eclipse. I remember watching the same eclipse from my front porch in Marietta. Kemp turns a night of star gazing into a feeling of connection to the people she’s with, a togetherness that engenders a hope for the future, “some hint of God beyond our own dark field. ” This line is a perfect ending for the collection, and a segue into Robin Kemp’s next one.

Robin Kemp's debut collection, This Pagan Heaven ($8, Pecan Grove Press), has been years in the making. I heard some of the poems in this collection back in 2003 when I first met Kemp on the Atlanta poetry scene. But her body of work took a dramatic shift -- and found a fierce, heartbreaking center -- when her beloved hometown of New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The collection opens with a series of love sonnets, which are perfectly nuanced and show Kemp's deft hand at writing formal verse. About eight poems in, Kemp begins to recall her life in Louisiana in "Pelican Sonnet." She praises the pelicans for plotting their return to the bayous despite the taint of petrochemicals, and then wistfully recalls sweet New Orleans thunderstorms in "Dreaming of Your Hair." There are memories of kissing in an automated carwash (Our window rides up, kissing/steam. We roll slowly/together into our miracle...) and her mother's hard won victory over cancer that took one of her breast ("New Breast"). Kemp teases her mother to show off after reconstruction surgery and to pull her shirt up on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras: "...when the college boys scream SHOW YOUR TITS she can and they will fall down and worship her great knockers..."

The center section of the book, "Bodies," is 11 pages of short, free-verse snapshots about those left behind in New Orleans after Katrina. A professor trapped in his attic fighting to save all his books of poetry from the floodwater; an old woman washed away leaving nothing behind but a walker and a plastic bag full of clothes; a bloated, decaying body caught in the flotsam around a city bridge. These images are searing and unforgettable. When she returns to New Orleans after the hurricane, unable to recognize streets and neighborhoods form her childhood, the loss is palpable.

Tucked between these elegies are sharp political poems, including one of Kemp's signature poems, "Pantoum for Ari Fleischer," a rebuke of Bush's former press secretary and how he manipulated the press and public in the run-up to the Iraq war. "Assemble the somnambulant press corps/to help us propagate our well-oiled story,/the old sweet lie of pro patria mori,/not the forces behind it."

Kemp's strong, unwavering voice shines through in all the poems of This Pagan Heaven. Her skill in writing formal poems that sound conversational and uncontrived put her in the company of Marilyn Hacker and A.E. Stallings. This collection was definitely worth the wait.

Wry, witty, often angry edging toward bitterness, this Katrina-inspired art is decidedly postmodern, clearly distrustful of traditional forms, confrontational, impatient, and there is almost enough of a theme here to announce a new school. . . .this from Robin Kemp's "Body" on the facing page [of New Orleans Review]: "the Dumaine Street Bridge/ ...now it's snagged itself/ just another face-down man/ right there where I used to walk the dog."