Just Poetry, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (HeadworX, 2007) ISBN978-0-473-12489-2
Bernard Gadd
In his 80s Campbell keeps writing the poetry. This little collection is a microcosm of his favoured themes: love, partings, humour (especially ‘The Brigadier's Secret Weapon' about a drunken member of the Maori battalion), people he's known, observations on the living, memories. It's a varied collection, including a long poem on Parihaka, an elegy for Lauris Edmond, and a ramble about people he worked with in School publications, as well as some crisp short lyrics. This is the contemporary, relaxed Campbell, still the perpetual Romantic:
spring surprises
with new pain,
poems wrung from
despair ...
(Fairy Tale)
though it seen to better effect in other poems:
She whose limbs are waters letting
Lights through smiles to my kiss,
([The Question)
yet with a 21st century mind set:
No, I'm not
Tennyson and I don't want to understand you
as he wanted to understand his ‘flower
in the crannied wall', ‘root and all, and all
and all', because I'm not anxious to know
‘what God and man is'. It's enough to lie
in the sun and enjoy it while it lasts.
(Shepherd's Purse)
Campbell retains his fondness for the rhymed stanza. But he's so competent it would be a curmudgeon who groaned at
Now I am old my thoughts oppress me,
the girls no longer cry, ‘Undress me.'
The good, the naughty, and a nun
Are shadows in the winter sun.
(Casanova)
But once again the poems that sparkle most are those of his childhood in the Cook Islands, and of Maori and Cook Islands legends. The collection opens with "A Childhood in the Islands" and "Cook Islands Rhapsodies":
and Atiu coming into view, small,
bush-clad, its two villages
clustered at the summit
...
I wanted silence,
to recall the feel of the place,
secretive, gloomy, guarded
by gigantic trees
([Darkness of Atiu)
and links to his past:
two young girls
on a flood-lit lawn dancing the hula
...
I thought of my father
and the effect my mother must have had
dancing the hula for him.
(Young Hula Dancers)
For me the best sequence was "Utu, A Legend of Pukerua Bay" retold in contemporary colloquial speech:
Haunui's the name - Big Wind,
at your service. Caught them
at it, didn't I? my woman
and Weku, my best mate
(1 Haunui)
This is an enjoyable book, quintessentially Campbell. There's an air of the elegiac about it ... though we must hope that this is not at all a final collection:
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.
(Tidal])
