Alistair Te Ariki Campbell: The Dark Lord of Savaiki - Collected Poems

This is the third time that Alistair Te Ariki Campbell has published his Collected Poems. The first was in 1981, the second the Pocket Collected Poems in 1996. This handsome new edition of more than 300 pages is justified by Campbell's prolific output in the past decade. More than half the contents have been written since 1996, that is, in the poet's 70s.

Version three of Campbell's Collected carries the general title The Dark Lord of Savaiki, a phrase that first appeared as title of a 1980 sequence which now looks to be pivotal in his career. "Savaiki" is the Tongarevan equivalent of the Maori "Hawaiki", the ancestral homeland, the place to which dead spirits return.

Tongareva (also known as Penrhyn Island) in the Northern Cooks was the birthplace of Campbell's Polynesian mother, and the place where he and his siblings lived until 1932 (Alistair was 7) when they were shipped off unceremoniously to a Dunedin orphanage after the death of their parents. The mother died of TB, the father, a Pakeha trader, of grief and alcoholism a year later.

These tragic circumstances, largely repressed in Campbell's early poetry, came increasingly to dominate his later work, especially after he revisited Rarotonga and Tongareva in the 1970s. The 1980 sequence is the moving record of that return, a poem which passes from grief, loss and agitation, to peace, love and reconciliation.

The "Dark Lord" in one sense is death itself who presides over mortal life and is now installed as the prevailing deity of all Campbell's poetry, from his famous early Elegy, written in memory of a friend killed in the mountains, to the recent sequences Gallipoli and 28 (Maori Battalion), which reflect on the war experiences of his father and brother respectively.

Jock Campbell survived World War I but fled to the islands to escape his memories; Stuart, Alistair's older brother, died in Italy a few weeks before the end of World War II. "I was just 22," Campbell with characteristic understatement has him say in Letter from Stuart Maireriki, "I'm not bitter,/but I could have lived a little longer."

It is hardly surprising that Campbell's early poetry, given his background, was dark and brooding. It was also intensely lyrical and touched with glamour and mystery in such poems as The Return, with its dream vision of bird-or-tree-like men with rain-jewelled, leaf-green bodies on a mist-shrouded southern beach, a poem that seems to anticipate prophetically his later recuperation of his Polynesian self.

After a barren period in the 1950s when he struggled with his dual identity to the extent of mental breakdown (see Personal Sonnets, 1960), Campbell found his way back to poetry through an ambivalent identification with Te Rauparaha which he explored in the sequence Sanctuary of Spirits (1963), written from his home in Pukerua Bay, overlooking Te Rauparaha's stronghold, Kapiti Island. Campbell projected his inner torments into his love-hate relationship with the violent Maori warrior and statesman.

Since the 1980s he has found poetry and peace not in repressing his distant past, but in embracing it and exploring it, as in such poignant poems as Elegy for Anzac Day and Death and the Tagua, which focus on his mother and father, or the war sequences mentioned above.

As man and poet both, Campbell is an admirably tough survivor, as he admits in his loquacious but likeable letter poems, Poets in Our Youth, addressed to his student-friends in late-1940s Wellington, and as almost every page in this monumental collection memorably attests.

* Peter Simpson is head of English at the University of Auckland.
* Hazard Press, $39.95