Kate Camp, published in New Zealand by Te Herenga Waka University Press, is the award-winning author of eight collections of poems, including The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (winner of the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry), How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020) also published in Canada by House of Anansi Press, and Makeshift Seasons (2025).
Camp's 'scorchingly good' memoir, You Probably Think This Song Is About You, was published in 2022, and her 2026 follow up, Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary, is a personal exploration of the year she turned fourteen.
In recognition of her work in both poetry and prose, Camp has been awarded two of New Zealand's most prestigious international literary fellowships: the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship 2017 and the Berlin Writers Residency 2011.
Camp comments: 'This is a very important poem to me. I wrote it during the Covid pandemic in 2020. New Zealand had one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, which was effective in eliminating the virus in the country. I wrote this poem after leaving my immediate neighbourhood for the first time in months, and walking on Wellington's south coast, a place both wild and suburban, on a wind-blasted autumn day.
'The poem isn't "about" the pandemic, but reading it now, I notice resonances. The lines his mother / a distant planet remind me of my mother, spending the lockdown alone. And the body's vulnerability is there in: you could pick up any visible knife / and, well, you know….
'Since childhood, whenever I see a sharp knife the thought pops into my head – oh, you could stab yourself in the eye with that. Unbidden thoughts like this are quite common, I think. I like to include things in poems that are private and transgressive, and give that jolt of recognition.
'The poem quotes from two other poets. The Ian Wedde lines And now I begin to revolve like a beacon / in the midst of dangers are reproduced by him a number of times in different poems with slightly different phrasing. I love their beauty, their mystery, and their weird confidence. The Lawrence Ferlinghetti as a lighthouse moves its megaphone / over the sea is one of his typically arresting images. It has stuck in my head for decades since studying him at university.
'The images came to mind because of the walk at Island Bay, where there is a faux lighthouse, but they also speak to the sense of scale that I felt with this poem. By recalling these two poetry ancestors and their lighthouses, I signal that there is something at work here beyond this place and time, something that can’t be held by one speaker's personal experience.
'The Covid lockdown in New Zealand began in a long, golden autumn—in the final section of the poem I italicise fall as I always do in my mind when I hear the word used to mean the season. To me it can never be separated from its other meanings, its gravity and descending music.
'In many cultures the kingfisher, with its watchful habits, is a symbol of vigilance and protection, and it is from the Greek name for the bird—halcyon—that we get the expression halcyon days. Even though the bird here is dead, its appearance at the end of the poem offers me a little fallen gift, a shining, bittersweet omen to weigh against my despairs.'
References
'And now I begin to revolve like a beacon in the midst of dangers'—Ian Wedde, 'To the poet Nigel Roberts in Sydney', Tendering (Auckland University Press, 1988), pp 19–20.
'as a lighthouse moves its megaphone over the sea'—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 'To the Oracle at Delphi', San Francisco Poems (City Lights Books, 2001), pp 79-81.
Links
Kate Camp's Te Herenga Waka University Press page
Photographer credit: Ebony Lamb