Makeshift Seasons, by Kate Camp
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Kate Camp’s new collection, Makeshift Seasons, opens with ‘Kryptonite’, a surprising, wonderful poem that features Superman and unfolds into notions of existence. The speaker is speaking and I am listening. I am on the edge of my chair listening as the speaker’s words touch upon what might deliver energy, strength, hope, power, visibility. The poem feels open and vulnerable and necessary. Face to face with danger damage devastation. I read:

I am gathering fragments of my humanity
like dull crystals
and throwing them into the sea

from ‘Kryptonite’

Ah. The ache. The shuffle between light and dark, gleam and memory-thud. At one point, the speaker borrows lines from Lawrence Ferlinghetti to suggest they ‘revolve like a beacon / in the midst of dangers // as a lighthouse moves its megaphone / over the sea‘. Such a mesmerising image I carry as I read. Almost as if this collection becomes lighthouse poetry, where writing is a navigation aid for both reader and writer, where reading and writing carry the potential of both beauty and storm.

I am drawn into Kate’s rhythm of writing, the surprising arrival of words, where you do a sweet word pivot: ‘In the Stonehenge of the house’ and ‘your hand Napoleoned in your shirt’ (from ‘Equinox’). I am drawn into the rhythm of the subject matter, the recurring locations and motifs, the insistent beat of the sea, the harbour, especially Island Bay. Or the uplift from terra firma to astral plains: the moon, cloud, sun, comets, light.

Poetry has the ability to make a moment in time exquisitely reachable, a place that is threaded with past and present, a song an attitude a joy. Kate does exactly this. I am caught up, stalled let’s say, in the moment of the poem. Take ‘Autumn’, where I am hitching a ride to the seaweedy coast, and I am in that Berlin bar singing ‘You’ve got a friend’. It’s ragged past rubbing against ragged present:

I come home past Chappies Dairy, it’s been closed
a while I think, the name painted over
in a mid-blue, still legible. All the dairies are closing
now we don’t need the things anymore we went there for.
Cigarettes and newspapers, I used to carry with me
everywhere a source of fire now it’s just my phone,
it’s startling torchlight, smooth warmth of its glass
and all its memories, it sets them sometimes to music, like I do.

When the world outside is in such cruel upheaval, when ‘kryptonite’ might stand in for a thousand threats and vulnerabilities, when life feels so brittle, to fall into the body of the poem—or let’s say the poem of the body because beneath and above the surface is stuttering health—is nourishing. So open. Reverberating. Resonant. This:

The failings of the body
can be a form of company
a trapped nerve ringing in the night
like music.

from ‘In the bathroom rubbish bin’

I return to my madcap notion that this is lighthouse poetry, a beacon in the pitching world of pain and dark, for this is what words can do, what we can do as we make our daily choices, as we get through the brittle and the shards of humanity. We can be that light. I want to quote you a thousand stanzas. I want to listen again to Kate read, and then pick up the book and find my way through the ‘makeshift seasons’. Thank you.

A reading

Photo credit: Ebony Lamb

Kate reads ‘Towards a working definition of global warming’, ‘Island Bay’ and ‘Extra-large geometry’

Kate Camp is the author of eight 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 essays, You Probably Think This Song Is About You (2022). Her most recent book is Makeshift Seasons (2025), a new collection of poetry. Kate was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington.

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