CAMPBELL, Alistair (Te Ariki)

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Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Rarotonga, Cook Islands, 25 June 1925; immigrated to New Zealand in 1933. Education: Anderson's Bay School, 1933–39; Otago Boys' High School, Dunedin, 1940–43; University of Otago, 1944; Victoria University, Wellington, 1945–47, 1951–52, B.A. in Latin and English; Wellington Teachers College, diploma in teaching. Family: Married 1) Fleur Adcock, q.v., in 1952 (divorced 1957), two sons; 2) Meg Andersen in 1958, one son and two daughters. Career: Staff member, Health Department Records Office, Wellington, 1944; gardener, Mowai Red Cross Hospital, Wellington, 1948–49; teacher, Newtown Primary School, 1954; editor, Department of Education School Publications Branch, Wellington, 1955–72; senior editor, New Zealand Council for Educational Research, Wellington, 1972–87. Poetry consultant, writer's workshop, University of South Pacific, Suva, 1974, and Lautoka, Fiji, 1980; president, P.E.N. New Zealand Centre, 1976–79; guest writer, Adelaide International Festival of the Arts, 1978. Awards: La Spezia Film Festival Gold Medal, 1974; New Zealand Book award, 1982; President of Honour, P.E.N. New Zealand Centre, 1989; Arts Council Scholarship in Letters, 1990; Writer's Fellow, Victoria University, 1992; Pacific Islands Artist award, 1998. D.Litt.: Victoria University of Wellington, 1999. Address: 4B Rawhiti Road, Pukerua Bay, Wellington, New Zealand.

Publications

Poetry

Mine Eyes Dazzle: Poems 1947–49. Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1950; revised edition, 1951, 1956.

Wild Honey. London, Oxford University Press, 1964.

Blue Rain. Wellington, Wai-te-ata Press, 1967.

Drinking Horn. Paremata, Bottle Press, 1970.

Walk the Black Path. Paremata, Bottle Press, 1971.

Kapiti: Selected Poems 1947–71. Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1972.

Dreams, Yellow Lions. Waiura, Alister Taylor, 1975.

The Dark Lord of Savaiki. Pukerua Bay, Te Kotare Press, 1980.

Collected Poems 1947–1981. Martinborough, Alister Taylor, 1981.

Soul Traps: A Lyric Sequence. Pukerua Bay, Te Kotare Press, 1985.

Stone Rain: The Polynesian Strain. Christchurch, Hazard Press, 1992.

Death and the Tagua. Wellington, Wai-te-ata Press, 1995.

Pocket Collected Poems. Christchurch, Hazard Press, 1996.

Gallipoli and Other Poems. Wellington, Wai-te-ata Press, 1999.

Recording: The Return and Elegy, Kiwi.

Plays

Sanctuary of Spirits (broadcast, 1963). Wellington, Victoria University-Wai-te-ata Press, 1963.

The Suicide (broadcast, 1965). Published in Landfall 112 (Christchurch),1974.

When the Bough Breaks (produced Wellington, 1970). Published in Contemporary New Zealand Plays, edited by Howard McNaughton, Wellington, Oxford University Press, 1974.

Radio Plays: Sanctuary of Spirits, 1963; The Homecoming, 1964; The Proprietor, 1964; The Suicide, 1965; Death of the Colonel, 1966; The Wairau Incident, 1967.

Television Documentaries: Island of Spirits, 1973; Like You I'm Trapped, 1975.

Novels

The Frigate Bird. Auckland, Heinemann Reed, and London, Methuen, 1989.

Sidewinder. Auckland, Reed Books, 1991.

Tia. Auckland, Reed Books, 1993.

Fantasy with Witches. Christchurch, Hazard Press, 1998.

Other

The Fruit Farm (for children). Wellington, School Publications Branch, 1953.

The Happy Summer (for children). Christchurch, Whitecomb and Tombs, 1961.

New Zealand: A Book for Children. Wellington, School Publications Branch, 1967.

Maori Legends. Wellington, Seven Seas, 1969.

Island to Island (memoirs). Christchurch, Whitcoulls, 1984.

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Manuscript Collections: University of Canterbury, Christchurch; Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library, Wellington; Archives, Library, Victoria University of Wellington.

Critical Studies: By James Bertram, in Comment (Wellington), January-February 1965; "Alistair Campbell's Mine Eyes Dazzle: An Anatomy of Success" by David Gunby, in Landfall (Christchurch), March 1969; "Alistair Campbell's Sanctuary of Spirits: The Historical and Cultural Context" by F.M. McKay, in Landfall (Christchurch), June 1978; Introducing Alistair Campbell by Peter Smart, Auckland, Longman Paul, 1982; "The Polynesian Voice" by K.O. Arvidson, in The Reviews Journal (Flinders University of South Australia), 1993; "Linguistics, Philology, Chickens and Eggs" by Richard Hogg, in English Historical Linguistics 1992, edited by Francisco Fermandez, Miguel Fuster, and Juan Jose Calvo, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1994.

Alistair Campbell comments:

When I began writing verse, like many other poets I came under the influence of W.B. Yeats and, later, Ezra Pound. Then I learned from certain Spanish, like Lorca, and Latin American poets, like Neruda, to write directly about my feelings. From American poets like James Wright, whose verse I considered attractive and fresh, I learned to loosen my lines and write simple, evocative lyrics drawing on the richness of the natural world.

Later I went to Maori history and my own family genealogy and traditions for Polynesian myths and legends that provided me with imagery for my personally charged dramatic lyrics, which are among my best work. In my family poems I explore the more painful aspects of my childhood and later family life. These are simple, straightforward poems written in gently paced blank verse. They are inward looking, owing little to outside influences.

More recently I have written contrasting lyric sequences, the first, "Gallipoli," on the disastrous campaign of 1915, in which I explore themes of violence, courage, comradeship, and folly in a classical setting, with overtones of the Trojan War. In the second sequence, "Cages for the Wind," the violence of war gives way to peace and quiet. I write about love for my wife, for our wind-swept landscape and the creatures we share it with. These are poems of old age, observed with humor, affection, and tolerance but with an underlying awareness of the darker side of things.

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Since his seventieth birthday in 1995, three major books have revived and redefined Alistair Te Ariki Campbell as a poet. The valedictory Death and the Tagua (1995), filled with retrospection and images of departure, is an address to the poet's lost family that weaves personative, narrative, and Polynesian elements into a resonant lyricism new even for this subtle master of word music. The Pocket Collected Poems (1996) gives summative shape to a body of work that has always been profoundly personal, and often deeply painful, while also highlighting the sustained Polynesian strain that is now made evident even in the early poems. His extraordinary continuing development is then shown in Gallipoli and Other Poems (1999). Here two sequences, one of war and the other of love, confirm a wholly contemporary mastery of flexible lyricism, wit, and conversational comedy as well as a courage that is now rare in New Zealand poetry to tackle big themes: history, tragedy, age, passion, loss.

Campbell (he first elected to use his full name in 1992) was born on Rarotonga, one of the Cook Islands, of a Scottish father, an accountant turned Pacific trader after the trauma of Gallipoli and the Somme, and the daughter of a Rarotonga elder. Both parents died before he was eight, and Campbell was educated in New Zealand, growing up as an orphan and exile and learning a new language and culture. The rich magic of English verse became his talisman, and his own poems were to seek compulsively for ideal and timeless love, to reconcile the inevitability of loss with "impossible yearnings" across seas that "stretch/quivering with dreams/towards ever-receding/landfalls."

From the outset, Campbell was an elegiac poet of extraordinary force. Loss sounds through early poems such as "Lament," "Fragment," and the well-known "Elegy" sequence of 1948–49 and on through "Personal Sonnets" and "Elegy for Anzac Day" to "Death and the Tagua." Even the most ecstatic or erotic outbursts (and Campbell does both well) take added intensity from the threat or fear of loss. Vitality in counterpoint with mortality gives power to poems from the early "August" to the late "Wairaka Rock." "Blue Rain" is perhaps its finest rendering, with its lovers "merry as thieves" who have nothing to fear but collapse and ruin. Even the rich coloring of "Love Song for Meg" is tinged for a moment by the "dull silver/of decaying trees." Through ecstasy there is always the glimpse of grief.

Campbell has often been called an "animistic" poet, and key poems like "The Return" indeed have an almost instinctual appeal, a duende drawn from a rare mythopoeic power. Although he is deeply read, Campbell uses nothing ready-made. A mythology's gods may become the poet's demons, and the Greek, Polynesian, and other myths are reforged in the smithy of his own often tortured soul. Thus animism and celebrations of love and landscape are intercut with mortality and loss. Even in "The Return" the hulks are spent, Dionysus drowned, the fires gone out, and the mist moving over the land.

Poems of Campbell's midcareer, grouped in the Collected Poems as "Personal Sonnets," make some autobiographical matters explicit. Full of unresolved questions and images of wrenching loss, they date from a period of psychiatric treatment and belong with the agonized conflicts and self-castigation of the poet's radio plays. The same tortured psyche, crying for exorcism or extinction, then produced the landmark "Sanctuary of Spirits" and other conjurings of the destructive spirit of the Maori warlord Te Rauparaha. Poems from the later 1960s through the 1980s brought a change from psychic rage to a more poignant or sorrowful mood, while also showing a more versatile talent than before. Their tone varies from rapturous to wry, from satiric to sexy, and the craft encompasses poignant wordplay in "Reflections on the Verb 'To Be,'" evocative minimalism in "Dream, Yellow Lions," and the impeccably modulated long line of "That Thing." While Campbell is always lyric, his poems are also dynamic and dramatic. They are not just songs; they move. Ecstasy verges into loss, the door closes, the bittern booms, the earth tilts, the child who might have been lost comes "Home from Hospital."

A pilgrimage to Tongareva (Penrhyn) in 1979 released Campbell's Polynesian self openly into his work, which now includes autobiography and Polynesian novels as well as poems that have drawn on Tongarevan myths and ancestral chants. (They also draw on Latin American and Spanish poetry, for Campbell is never facile.) His later poems inscribe the South Pacific in image after image of a wholly distinctive vividness: "The trade winds/are your fingers/on my eyelids," or "atolls in their green birth/pricking the white horizon." Because such images are known from within, they can have wit: "Who but a goofy goddess/could scatter pebbles/all over the Pacific/and call them land?" They also have cruelty and darkness, as in the "Dark Lord of Savaiki" sequence, in which nine painful poems must be endured before the final cathartic image: "Father and mother/walking hand in hand/across the swirling waters/of Taruia Passage,/where the leaping dolphins/celebrate the dawn." We recognize now how often, even in the early poems, Campbell has been making the effort to record such fundamental Polynesian images as the sound of the Pacific shore, the encounter of ocean with land, "the surf-loud beach."

From his first collection, Mine Eyes Dazzle (1950), Campbell's charismatic voice has won an unusually broad range of admirers. Although he is still excluded from some academic orthodoxies, he gets substantial treatment in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998). He is that rare kind of writer who may seem superficially conventional while responding to a deeper originality and more finely attuned sense of the time. (One thinks, for example, of Hardy.) The lyric, resonant, and now identifiably Polynesian strain in Campbell's voice, from "Lament" and "The Return" to "Tongareva" and "Gift of Dreams," may prove more central than the fashions of cerebral and ludic sparseness and at the least provide a wholly distinctive pleasure to the ear and inward eye.

—Roger Robinson