Airini Beautrais
Age of Orpah by Carin Smeaton (Titus Books, 2026), 110pp, $30; Leather and Chains: My 1986 diary by Kate Camp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), 432pp, $40
Age of Orpah is the final instalment in a trilogy of recent poetry collections by Carin Smeaton, the first two being Hibiscus Tart (2024) and Death Goddess Guide to Self Love (2025). Each of these collections has its own unique essence, but some unifying themes do emerge, including disobedient or dangerous female characters, geopolitics—particularly the Israel–Palestine conflict—and socioeconomic inequality here in Aotearoa.
Orpah is a minor figure in Judaeo-Christian tradition. She makes a small appearance in the Bible, in the Book of Ruth: Ruth and Orpah are married to brothers and are widowed; Ruth stays with her mother-in-law Naomi, while Orpah returns to her people. In the kind of duality that often crops up in biblical stories, Ruth is cast as good, loyal and steadfast, having cleaved to the ‘right’ religion, whereas Orpah represents disloyalty and devotion to the ‘wrong’ gods. Rabbinic tradition has furthermore cast Orpah as the mother of four giants, including Goliath, as well as a sexually promiscuous woman. Strangely enough, Orpah is also the birth name of Oprah Winfrey, who is said to have changed her name due to people constantly mispronouncing it.
Smeaton’s Orpah is a typically feisty character. In ‘Book of Ruthless’, Orpah, cast as a worker in Auckland, describes being persecuted by Ruth and Naomi, flipping the biblical narrative on its head. There is also the sense that Smeaton’s Orpah represents resistance to Zionism and the idea of a ‘chosen’ people with the God-given right to commit genocide. Here, poetry provides a useful means of examining stories: how does a dominant theology spread, and how is it used to oppress others? While it is not explicitly addressed, there is also an undercurrent of Aotearoa’s colonial history, with Christian missionaries attempting to erase Māori atua and spiritual traditions. In another poem, ‘this mighty church’, we are reminded: ‘u shush u listen / it’s all about da powr’.
As well as interrogating political and religious hegemonies, Smeaton pushes boundaries with language. The poems are filled with slang, dialect and colloquial style; there is also frequent use of te reo alongside English. A quirk of Smeaton’s (which has increased across the three books) is the use of special characters in place of letters: mathematical symbols, numbers, reference markers, letters from other languages. There is something fun about this: the poems become a puzzle to decipher. In the poem ‘press conf in Tel Aviv’, the repeating line ‘wot will appease you’ is teased through variations such as ‘wot wi11 app3453 U’, giving a sense of the mechanised and automated aspects of warfare.
As with the previous two collections in the trilogy, Age of Orpah contains strong narrative elements and is peopled with a range of characters. As well as the titular Orpah, there are three generations of women in the sequence ‘Day Crawlers’. There are also William and Weston, Elijah, Alfred and Angel, and even Oprah Winfrey herself. It’s ambiguous whether Angel is a literal angel or an unhoused person sleeping on the streets in central Auckland, and perhaps he is both. He wears Ray-Bans all the time because his eyes are too terrifying; he patrols the Lorne precinct and stops people urinating in a loading dock; he sees a lot of things, like people jumping off the motorway bridge, sometimes surviving.
For me, the Angel poems are the ones where Smeaton’s talent for giving a dignified voice to the disaffected and the marginalised comes through most strongly. The most heartbreaking poem is ‘So u wanna b a rockstar—for the boy with such a big heart it hurt too much’, in which Angel offers to ‘point U the way to da Cape’ to a 17-year-old who has checked ‘outta this world’. Angel, who likes Jimmy Barnes, has a brother named Jimmy in Mercer and has ‘BIG. FREAKY. PLANS.’ for Taumarunui, calls to mind the biblical quote ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’. The contrast between religious ideology that insists on a ‘true’ religion and obedience to a ‘one true god’ and actually behaving in ways that reflect Christian teachings is evident here. In a final poem, ‘Faerie tale ending’, which functions something like an afterword or artist’s statement to the whole trilogy, Smeaton acknowledges ‘I talks lots bout angels’ and muses that ‘U might want more meaning / or question my authenticity’.
In fact, there can be no question of authenticity. What I enjoy most about Smeaton’s poetry, although its themes and stories are often deeply painful, is how real it feels. This is the Auckland, the Aotearoa and the world that exists. These are characters that, even if fictional, ring true. There is no pretension, no glossing over things, no move-along orders: this is reality and the people who live in it, who are not going away, who are not going to be quiet and obedient. Age of Orpah and the trilogy it belongs to are certainly not easy reads, but I think they are essential ones.
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I have to say that I was a little apprehensive about reading Kate Camp’s Leather and Chains: My 1986 diary. This is a memoir, but it’s also the diary of a 13- and 14-year-old child. The blurb somewhat jokingly states that 1986 is ‘The year I turned fourteen. The year my parents divorced. The year I had sex for the first time. The year I learned to use the microfiche’. I am generally averse to anything where a teenager’s nascent sexuality could be construed as titillating by a reader. The idea of reading a child’s diary, even when that former child is now in her fifties and has obviously consented to its publication, feels like a kind of invasion into the emotional safe space of a vulnerable young person.
However, my misgivings were soon dispelled as I warmed to both the narrators in this book: the 1986 diary writer and the 2026 writer reflecting on the diary one day at a time. They are the same person, but they are also, obviously, not the same person. There is a lot of meditating on the nature of memory. Entire characters have been forgotten: who is Graeme and why is he coming over for a haircut? Some events have completely fallen out of memory; 2026 Kate has entirely rewritten other events in her mind and is shocked to discover what 1986 Kate actually had to say. I enjoyed the interplay between the two voices, one speaking to an imaginary reader, one to her younger self. There is also an exploration of the relationship to truth: the young diarist is performative, not always willing or able to talk about everything that happens or how she really feels. One day she writes: ‘Came home & Mum was having a nervous breakdown in the lounge’, abruptly followed by a list of other happenings including ‘studied’, ‘got pissed’, ‘watched firework’ and ‘had shower’.
Camp demonstrated her talents as a memoir writer with her 2022 personal essay collection You Probably Think This Song Is About You. Reading the essays, I was occasionally shocked at how casually the narrator treated traumatic experiences, moving on quickly from something fairly messed-up to the next topic, without much unpacking. In Leather and Chains the exploration becomes a bit more nuanced, perhaps because there is a real artefact here in the form of the diary. Of an incident where young Kate, so drunk she can’t really remember what happened, is (to all intents and purposes) sexually assaulted by her older sister’s boyfriend and his friend, Camp writes: ‘I have honestly thought about this incident back and forth now so many times I just don’t know what I think or feel about it. Is me not seeing it as a sexual assault just an adult version of my teenage bravado?’ Of course, there is no ‘correct’ way to process the past, traumatic or otherwise. As readers of memoir, we should not go in with expectations of how a person should have acted or should feel about things now—our experiences, and our responses to them, belong solely to us. These kinds of reflections and explorations help to remind us of this.
One thing that struck me, which is interesting given Camp is mostly known as a poet, is how the form dictates the content. Young Kate is given the One Year Diary as a present. These small, lockable diaries were fairly ubiquitous in the ’80s and ’90s—I think just about every girl I went to school with had one. The format of the diary, with one tiny page per day, creates the structure for the narrative that young Kate writes. Each day’s entry has a brief summary of events, sometimes wildly juxtaposed, and often rounds off with a poem or a bit of teenage philosophising, then some variation of the sign-off ‘Leather and Chains.’ It appears that Kate dutifully writes in her diary at the end of each day, regardless of where she is or what she is doing. It strikes me that she is a kid who meets expectations: there is one page allocated per day, so a page a day is what she will write! It’s a One Year Diary, and she isn’t given another one in 1987 (or any other year, apparently), so she doesn’t write a diary ever again. Her drinking, drug use and sex, along with her ’80s fashion sense, musical tastes, film and book preferences, all feel like the attitudes and behaviour of a child who is desperate to be cool, knowledgeable and experienced, and to win at Teenage Girl bingo. Jacket covered in badges? Check! Boyfriend with a car? Check!
It’s familiar territory to many who grew up in this era, but is nevertheless quite horrifying at times as an adult reader. Were a lot of parents, like Kate’s parents, more lax back in the day? Was it because of naivety, because they were tied up in their own lives, because they didn’t care, or was it simply a cultural moment? This is not the story of a disadvantaged upbringing. Kate’s parents are a lawyer and a teacher; they live in well-to-do Khandallah. Kate seems to be constantly buying clothes, going to movies and eating out: finances are clearly not an issue. Yet the ‘games room’ is full of pot and cigarettes, the girls frequently skip school and get drunk, and a socially odd 20-year-old named Cameron regularly stays over and sleeps with Kate. As a parent of teenagers, I can’t imagine this all being normal and acceptable. It makes me think a lot about how social mores change. It’s an interesting portrait of the 1980s, a time when not only could you smoke indoors, but a 13-year-old kid could sit and have a coffee and a cigarette in a café. Not only did teachers smoke in school staffrooms, but apparently students did too. Perhaps kids were just expected to grow up faster. Life expectancy was shorter, after all.
Another interesting, and less troubling, feature is the language. Every generation, and every friend group, has its own vernacular, and young Kate is no exception. Everything good is ‘main’; bad things are ‘unmain!’ McDonald’s is ‘Ron’s’. The sign-off ‘Leather and Chains’ is often paired with ‘Treat me rough’, a quote from the early 1980s TV series The Young Ones.
Most of all, for me, Leather and Chains depicts an exercise in self-compassion. Camp wraps her teenage self in love, understanding and pity, but also pride. She validates the dorky theatre kid and finds the seeds of the accomplished poet she will become. At times she openly laughs at herself; at other times she speaks the words to this child that she clearly wanted to hear: ‘Poor girl.’ ‘Feeling a lot of love for this girl on this day.’ ‘Love to you.’ I think this is a useful read for anyone struggling with aspects of their childhood and youth, and wanting to reconcile themselves with the complicated nature of memory.
AIRINI BEAUTRAIS is a Whanganui-based writer and teacher. Her collection of stories, Bug Week (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2020), won the 2021 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her most recent books are The Beautiful Afternoon (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), a collection of essays, and Salt Quilt (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), a collection of poetry.
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