Islands romance

Press, 5 December 1984, Page 30

Islands romance

Island to Island. By Alistair Campbell. Whitcoulls, 1984. 120 pp. Illustrations. $16.95. “Island to Island” is the autobiography of the early life of the New Zealand poet Alistair Campbell. In 1974 the poet received a telephone call from a cousin he had never met, a Cook Islands relative looking for the Campbell children who had been “lost across the sea” more than 40 years before. As a result, Campbell learned what it was like to be welcomed back into a Polynesian family after long years of absence — and he resolved to revisit the islands. The voyage he describes is one of discovery and recollection. His evocation of life in the islands is interwoven with the exploration of a past from which he had long been separated. There are old ghosts to be confronted, too, in this tale of a paradise lost. With the help of documents and photographs, Campbell attempts to know the parents he only half remembers — Jock, the white trader from New Zealand, and Teu the beautiful Penrhyn Islander. He reconstructs the idyllic world which, for him and his brothers and sister, was shattered by the early deaths of both parents and the abrupt transition to the austerity of a Dunedin orphanage in the 19305. The book ends with the publication of “Mine Eyes Dazzle,” his first collection of poems, in 1950. These graceful memoirs tell of a life filled with incident and drama. “Island to Island” is a true romance of the South Pacific.