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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 is the University of Waikato writer-in-residence for 2002.
“By sandwiching ‘love’ between ‘unfinished’ and ‘theorem’ in the title,” she writes, “I think I was trying to escape from the essential soppiness of writing a love poem. Like a lot of poets, I’ve always been attracted to scientific ideas. There’s something exhilarating about science — the way it looks and looks and doesn’t know what it’s looking for and then suddenly notices something extremely important, just sitting there. Love can be like that too.
“This poem was recently used as a set text in an exam for secondary school students. One of the questions went something like: ‘Choose ONE phrase that speaks about the indefinable nature of love.’ Students wrote in their answers things like ‘Kate has obviously never been in love,’ and ‘Kate doesn’t know anything about boats.’”
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