Makeshift Seasons
by Kate Camp

Makeshift Seasons is a watery book. That’s not to say that the ocean is the sole subject of Kate Camp’s eighth collection – it’s surprising, on a second read, to find that it’s mentioned relatively sporadically, separated by poems about Grease and the Middle Ages – but the ‘zoo-ey reek’ of a changing room and the ‘background sound of sea’ seem to permeate even those poems taking place far from the coast. The sea is a place of strangeness and a place for communion with strangers, as in ‘Autumn’:

Someone warns us of a pod of moon
jellyfish between here and the raft and it’s
like swimming through a school of breast implants —
soft, heavy, strangely warm.

Camp is attentive to the sea, always listening for its dispatches. ‘Not much from the sea today’, she writes in ‘Island Bay’, ‘just a small, audible turning over’. Its vastness lingers at the edge of so many of these poems – a world-widening presence. The ritual of swimming that punctuates Makeshift Seasons means the speaker is often in a state of transformation, shedding clothes for a swimsuit and then getting dressed again: ‘I can change anywhere.’

In Makeshift Seasons, Camp tends to treat the body as an alien. The speaker comments on her own limbs, extremities, and facial features with detached curiosity. ‘Sometimes’, she writes in ‘Island Bay again’, ‘I find my teeth don’t fit together anymore.’ And in another in the Island Bay series, ‘Island Bay Beach’, she writes, ‘There is something wrong / with my face it makes sad shapes’, as though it’s operating on commands she doesn’t remember giving.

The speaker’s body may not be functioning optimally, but it is the vessel in which she must navigate the world, as in ‘Inpatient versus outpatient’:

I breathe in all the ways I never wanted to.
I know I should be grateful
for the compounds that sustain me,
molecules locked in formation,
mathematical bonds of fifteens and eights,
but I never had a lot of time for numbers.

Still, this body can provide comfort to itself, and it does so perhaps unthinkingly. Hands are particularly conspicuous in this regard, reaching up to cover the speaker’s face with their ‘perfectly-fitted pads’ or creating a ‘little church’ of privacy in which the speaker can ‘make a count of all [her] griefs’. Camp’s attitude to the body echoes her attitude to the world beyond: it doesn’t quite fit her, but she’ll make do with its imperfections and revel in its surprising joys.

Amidst a majority of poems set in Wellington parks and beaches and swimming pool carparks, memories of elsewhere float to the surface. We travel through Germany and Ireland and France, with each place represented by a few distilled images, as in ‘Wittenberg’:

                                    we picked some apples
and all around us in the grass were soft brown rotting apples,
like sugary planets

Camp doesn’t try too hard to make a statement of each story or scene. The noticing and recollection, the recreation of the hushed town, the feeling of being there again: this is purpose of these poems. Camp infuses these faraway, long-ago postcards with tension, allowing none to sit comfortably in the category of either lovely or grotesque – the apples in Wittenberg, though rotting, bear the sweetness of sugar and the majesty of planets, while Camp’s memory of the National Gallery of Ireland, in ‘Here is the church’, is edged with niggling pain:

how I picked my cuticle and it bled|through every gallery,
bled before the painting by Yeats’ brother
of the swimming race in the urban river

The poems in this collection are loosely structured, often blurring and flowing into each other. There is nothing flashy, no show-stopping moment that casts any other into shadow. Yet there’s nothing boring, either. The pace feels fluid and constant, but never slack, and Camp’s candid, stubborn voice is ever present, whether in brusque declarations like ‘I am so fucking sick of making my own history’ (in ‘History’) or in the charmingly circuitous phrases that pop up here and there:

I let you choose the music
and you choose the music
I would choose

And though there’s a steeliness that runs through the collection, it’d be wrong to say there’s no room for vulnerability. There are bursts of potent sincerity and even romance, scabs picked at, skin ripped open. In fact, on the first page of the book, in ‘Kryptonite’, Camp is already poking holes in the concept of Superman’s indestructibility:

like all of us
without his glasses
his face feels very open

 

you could pick up any visible knife
and, well, you know…

Camp’s speaker often comes to us from the edge of a scene instead of centre stage, and her attention is also drawn to those objects and occurrences that populate the corners of our vision. It’s on the sidelines that she notices what glimmers in the world: the ‘rubbish / bags hunched and glowing’ on her evening walk while a dog drinks up blood-tainted water from a puddle and the wetsuit hanging ‘in the shower / like a folded shadow’. She observes Iceland ‘mainly through the window of a small blue car’. There’s rarely a sweeping vista, and Camp suggests that the details we may not tend to notice or praise – those that might often be cordoned off or tidied away or cropped out of photos – are the ones worth all our attention.

For Camp, poetry is not a place for transcendence but one in which to tackle – even to toy with – the compounding difficulties of day-to-day life. Though Camp refuses to wholeheartedly praise the world, her poems never sink into outright despair, either. In ‘Kryptonite’ the speaker tells us, ‘I personally walked away from hope some years ago / it was destroying me’. But a few lines later, she describes a dead kingfisher as a ‘glowing miracle’. These poems enact the suggestion by Pablo Neruda that poetry should smell ‘of lilies and of urine, splashed by the variety of what we do’.

Makeshift Seasons is a satisfyingly cohesive collage of the difficulties and ‘strangely warm’ moments of a few seasons of its poet’s life. There’s so much to savour here, so many fresh lines of music ringing out in a clear, honest voice.