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The failings of the body
can be a form of company
a trapped nerve ringing in the night
like music.
Kate Camp’s poetry has been described by readers as fearless, affable and ‘containing a surprising radicalism and power’. In her new collection, she is ever alert to the stories unfolding all around us and inside our own bodies. As she is striding away from hope, she is also holding on tightly to the promise of morning. The poems move between distant planets and Chappies Dairy, between Mont-Saint-Michel and the lighthouse in Island Bay, with every moment, every feeling, every conviction on the edge of becoming another.
Like the plumber who can hear water running deep underground, Makeshift Seasons is a book of extraordinarily sharp sensing and knowing.
Praise for Kate Camp
‘These magical, knotty works react to a fragile world, and Camp navigates the light along with the dark.’ —Paula Green
‘Each poem’s like a bumper ride in a fairground, crashing into obstacles, at once jarring and exhilarating.’ —David Eggleton
‘Here is “the so-called outside world”, and here is its wonderfully sensitive, fluently understated poet.’ —Stephanie Burt
‘A wild, imaginative energy flares throughout the collection. Kate Camp is a fearless writer.’ —New Zealand Book Awards
Poet and essayist Kate Camp was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington. She is the winner of many prestigious awards, including the 2011 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency and the 2017 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. She is the author of seven previous collections of poems, including The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (winner of the 2011 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry) and How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020), and a collection of autobiographical essays, You Probably Think This Song Is About You (2022).
Cover photo: [woman on beach], New Zealand, by Eric Lee-Johnson. © Te Papa. Te Papa (O.030612)
Cover design: Philip Kelly
