The Zebra Path of Tree Light
by
Kai Jensen
Publication date
ISBN:
April
2025
978-1-923248-10-6
About the author
Kai Jensen lives, works and writes on Yuin Country, at Wallaga Lake on the New South Wales Far South Coast. Kai was born in Philadelphia, USA in 1959; he lived from the age of five in Aotearoa/New Zealand, then moved to Australia in 2004, and is now an Australian citizen. Kai’s poetry-writing was interrupted by his career as a university manager, but since moving to Wallaga Lake in 2017 he has resumed writing poetry and sending it out for publication, while continuing to work as a consultant to universities and a specialist editor.
Kai’s poems have appeared in Australia, in 34 to 37 Degrees South, The Age, fourW, Cordite, Overland, the South Coast Writer’s Centre’s annual anthologies, Southerly and Westerly; in Aotearoa/New Zealand, in JAAM, Landfall, Metro Magazine, Poetry NZ, Printout, Sport and Takahe; in Canada, in Poetry Pacific; in India, in The Journal of Literature and Aesthetics; and in the United States, in The Fictional Café, Hole in the Head Review, The Inquisitive Eater, Men Matters Online, New Verse News, Oddball Magazine and Rattle.
About the book
In THE ZEBRA PATH OF TREE LIGHT, Kai’s poetry ranges from personal narrative and captured scenes, through playful and speculative, to postmodern forms such as erasure poems. The poems express his love of art and literature, and are coloured in bright and dark tones by his travels, Buddhism, a loving marriage to a psychotherapist who is also a fabric artist, and a sombre view of life’s challenges and disappointments.
Kai Jensen’s poetry is whimsical, gentle and reflective. He scrutinises everyday anxieties, whilst celebrating the domestic, alongside a detached appraisal of the process of aging. The poems exhibit a self-conscious irony bordering on the disingenuous. They’re full of compelling ideas and word combinations, unexpected verbs and nouns creating sharp images. Jensen is a keen observer, a quality which should never be underestimated and always appreciated. The details of encounters linger in the mind. His watching and listening are empathetic and generous, realist elements balanced by the imaginative. This collection makes astute use of found material and includes superb erasure poems. Jensen works an idea and cycles back in satisfying ways or moves on to surprise the reader; the endings are superb. Sometimes laconic, relaxed or seemingly otherwise, this is confident writing that fuses the profound and the humorous.
--OWEN BULLOCK
Reading Kai Jensen’s first book of poetry is like watching a fast bowler coming in off the long run—if that run began in Philadelphia, swerved through New Zealand, and then ended with a perfect outswinger delivered from the south coast of New South Wales. These are deft and graceful poems that sing south coast locations into existence, or that soar to global and cosmological heights. Jensen might label this a late return to poetry, but there is a deep and abiding wisdom that is seen throughout the book, including a series of illuminating transactions with modernist literature and art.
The Zebra Path of Tree Light shows us that poetry is always and already there, waiting to be discovered in the world’s brilliantly ordinary spaces: when signs snag our attention, when we glimpse a figure in an airport, or when we are asked to hold up a quilt. Yet this poetic latency is also accompanied by Jensen’s attention to craft. You must savour this book for the elegant pleasures of its poetic language: the exquisite imagery, the sonorous patterning, the play of syntax across forms. Thus we are shown that poetry is a thing that is both found and made. That is Jensen’s generous gift to readers.
--LACHLIAN BROWN
Kai’s poems deftly intersperse the practicalities of our daily lives with illuminated moments that lead us to glimpse an understanding of our place in a beautiful yet fragile environment. Undercut with delicate slices of humour, his words reflect a genuine poet who deeply considers what he’s about.
--LINDA ALBERTSON