Poems Adrift Meg Campbell (Te Kotare Press, 2007) RRP $20 ISBN 978 0 9597765 0 8
Nancy Loader
Meg Campbell was born in 1937 in Palmerston North. She married Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, also a poet, and lived for the rest of her life in Pukerua Bay, Porirua, a setting that inspired more poems. Her first book of poems, The Way Back (1981) won a PEN award. A Durable Fire (1982) further reflected her experiences with severe depression and its treatment in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s. She published six books of poetry over the last 25 years.
The title of this, her final, collection of poetry is appropriate. It clearly reflects the style and content of the poems which are one woman's musings on the paradoxes of life, death, love and relationships over a period of about 12 years. There is nothing profound or startling in this collection, it is easy to read and well laid out. The poet explores her own feelings about her life and approaching death with a degree of equanimity.
A lengthy introduction by John O'Connor places the poet's work in context with time and place, and the overall evolution of poetry in New Zealand.
Many of her poems are about her deep, sometimes turbulent, but lasting relationship with her husband. The collection starts with the poem ‘Too Free With Words':
I can't explain what binds me to the life
here with you. Without urgency I mull it over.
It's your footfall, marking your movements
through the house, something I need to secure
the rhythm of each day. If I call to you,
and if I find your chair empty,
I trail off to find you, to ask you what you
think of this or that notion. I always
loved you more than those other women
obsessed about you
...
I was yours for life - if you wanted me,
and it is still the same. Nothing has changed.
The reality of the sad fragmentation of families is clearly expressed in ‘Take-Aways':
Some children pass away
from our lives. Not dead,
but, all the same, missing.
Their mothers, once partners
to our sons, take away the kids.
...
We count what we have left -
four out of eleven. We'll make
four into a multitude.
‘Publishing My Poetry', which completes the collection, is amusing and will strike a resonance with all those on the brink of becoming published poets.
I should have known
that the large spider in the bath
and the dead bumblebee
in the dining room were,
of course, bad omens.
The news was that my brave
book was in danger of being
aborted so late in it's gestation -
not aborted, but miscarried!
Meg Campbell died on November 17, 2007, and Poems Adrift was launched the next day.
