A ramshackle house rests on eggshells. A woman gazes through a doorway. A ladder leads to nowhere. High above, there are birds. This is “Nest” by the artist Suzanne Sbarge, and it’s the work featured on the cover of Lauren Camp’s fifth poetry collection, Took House. “Nest” evokes the same almost dissociative feeling that Camp’s poems do—moments viewed through wine-tinted glasses, here and then gone. “I want to talk about what I believe / is beautiful, and this is complicated by all the oil,” Camp writes in the second poem of the collection, titled “Find the Color of Survival.” She goes on to write about love, art, longing, and conflict; she finds the beauty in complexity.
The choices Camp makes regarding punctuation influence the sense of time passing in her writing. Her ideas flow across lines and stanzas. The poem “Gin” is an excellent example of this. It’s only the very last line of the final stanza that ends with a period. This makes it difficult to select lines to quote. For example, the second to last stanza by itself, “in an abyss deeper / than the mind / until his body” feels incomplete and unsatisfying—it’s a fleeting half-thought. The entire poem, however, captures a journey from sobriety to drunkenness, from the day’s first gin to numbness.
Some of my favorite poems in the collection are the ekphrastic poems—the ones that describe works of art. My favorite—if I had to pick one—is “Black Place,” based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Place, Grey and Pink. Camp begins by describing the piece as “dust-brushed and shaken / amid suggestion of bone” before shifting abruptly to the painting process with the lines “first grinding of pigment and palette / knife / broken pastel / a thousand forms of time.” Camp draws a clear connection between visual art and the written word with her ekphrastic poems. “Black Place” is particularly interesting because of the line about the different forms of time—art describes moments. Art about art is more transcendent.
Whether you look for beauty in the curve of a bottle or on the wings of a bird of prey, you’re sure to find it in this collection. Took House is as brilliant as it is haunting, and I can’t recommend it enough.
