It's Love, Isn't It?, The Love Poems Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and Meg Campbell; Introduction by Joy MacKenzie (HeadworX, Wellington) ISBN 978-0-473-13598-0

Suzanne Vaassen

This is a classic. Dedicated to the Campbells' five children, Greg, Andrew, Aurelian, Josie and Mary, it is the story of the relationship of their parents, from the inside. It is a wonderful testament to the lives of two poets, one of whom is more widely known. Alistair Campbell has received many New Zealand awards, culminating in an ONZM in the New Year Honours 2005, and the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry, also in 2005.

            These public honours by no means diminish Meg's contribution to poetry in New Zealand. In fact, for this reviewer, hers equals his. My introduction to Alistair's poetry came with ‘The Rock Spring' in New Zealand Poetry Yearbook 1951 when he was 26 and Meg 14. She must have been about 20 when she met him. The front cover pictures them on their wedding day and the back, a more recent image.

            Joy MacKenzie, who wrote an MA thesis on Meg's work, has contributed an introduction. MacKenzie wrote a chapter on the Campbells for Deborah Shepard's Between the Lives: Partners in Art (AUP, 2005). She says the "affection, affinity and contentment" they shared was obvious to her as an interviewer.

            To have someone write you a poem, my, then you write one back, and so it goes on for 50 or more years, back and forth, in his personal book of poems about her and perhaps her book about him, like ‘the Browning couple', only for far longer and then, to publish them 9 months after she dies, is a story for New Zealand literature to cherish.

            Meg published six collections of poetry, beginning with The Way Back, which won the Best First Book of Poetry in 1982. On 17 November 2007, two days before her 70th birthday and one day after her death, Poems Adrift, her final book, was launched.

            These poems are about life, but they do not exclude death, which seems to be accepted sweetly, to be written about, but not with anger. It is good that the Campbells lead by example.

 Alistair matched their love poems on facing pages throughout It's Love, Isn't It? as if he'd been trying to define exactly what was going on all those years between them. Perhaps he has done so; perhaps there is still an element of spiritual mystery laid within the lines. I have only one comment about the layout: since most poems are neither initialed nor credited in the text the reader has to return time and again to the contents page for verification. Deliberate: perhaps in the long run it does not matter who wrote what nor when. Here is one:

I made this poem for you
Out of tidal wrack.
I spoke my lines to the wind,
And the wind blew them back.

This is my last poem,
It's out there on the beach
For the first high tide to turn,
And float it out of reach.

This is the text of ‘Tidal/ for Meg, 1937-2007'. Alistair Campbell has written this quintessential  poem relating to life by the sea in New Zealand. The couple lived for 47 years in Pukerua Bay, near Wellington. Another reference to the sea, in ‘Dreams of Porirua Hospital' is also by Alistair.

I have your love words still,
so thin and transparent with neglect....
I will take them down to the beach
I will call out your name -
please, listen -
I will send them skimming over waves
all the way to the open sea.

Meg had apparently given him "love letters, / the words worn smooth as pebbles" and they were in pockets he had to empty out to police, a difficult yet beautiful moment.

Their individual visions combine to form a collection which has only one voice; it's music, note upon note, tone upon tone, blending to the form of a sonata, or an opera, for there were difficulties before there were resolutions. There was drama and there are lullabies to cool the fractured mind.

            The collection begins with a poem in italics for Alistair - Meg: Ghost Walk. It is not included in the contents list, left: Alistair's, right: Meg's. It is in Meg's voice:

...       Only I know the extent
of your devotion to your gifts, and your
love for the ones who needed your
exceptional strength of mind. Now
turn away from me. It is hard to leave
this poignant garden and you there alone."

Page 1 contains lines from each of them: Alistair: "Meg's loveliness ... In that absurd boatshed how it glowed, while the tide chuckled and slapped below us - God, how she glowed! ...Wild honey."

Meg: "I was yours for life - if you wanted me, and it is still the same. Nothing has changed." (From "Too Free with Words," 2006.)

            The final poem, on the last page, is also Meg's. It's called ‘Resistance, 1994'.

... Press
my flower in a page
of his book, where he
writes only of me, and on that one page -
one line - where my spirit
rests, I'll tell myself that
I'm unique ...


It is a love poem and "love is not ending", but neither is their relationship. Its intimacy lives on in this sensitive and classic collection.

 

 

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