Wild Honey: Poems

Te Ao Hou, September 1964, Page 51

Wild Honey: Poems by Alistair Campbell Oxford University Press, 19/- reviewed by James K. Baxter It is a sign of the breaking of barriers between New Zealand and England—the falling into disuse of the old fallacy of condescension towards ‘colonial’ culture—that the Oxford University Press has published yet another book of verse by a New Zealand poet. Enough good poems had been written here ten years ago to warrant overseas publication; but English publishers had not yet changed their habits of thought. The Oxford University Press is to be congratulated on its timely and positive move, and, in the case of Mr Campbell's book, on a superb format and cover design. Mr Campbell has suffered perhaps from being regarded as pre-eminently a poet of youth—the power, glamour, and legendary invulnerability of youth. It was this quality in his work which made him our most popular poet. The poems deserved it; but that's beside the point. People have always wanted poets to be undomesticated creatures, sensuous though not sensual, survivors from Eden, myth-makers, fated to die young. The poets disappoint them. In Mr Campbell's case, after a long period of hibernation, he began to write different poems —stripped, hard, ironical poems, relying on structure rather than glamour to carry the mood— ‘Sometimes the weather clears and far below I see the plains—what brought us to this height? The bones of fallen climbers shine like snow, And I secure each foothold as I go. ‘In my exhaustion it has sometimes seemed That we were climbing up the face of God, And that the water falling on us streamed From His eyes — but I woke and knew I dreamed, ‘And wept bitterly, though I hid my tears, Pretending to be gay when I despaired … My children climb the mountain unawares As eagerly as up a flight of stairs …' I quote these lines from ‘The Climber’, a poem of Mr Campbell's second period, as good as any he wrote in his first, not excluding even the magnificent and well-known ‘Elegy’. Among new material, there is also the sequence ‘Sanctuary of Spirits’, written originally for radio, in which Mr Campbell makes a mainly successful use of episodes from the career of Te Rauparaha. Any reader interested in a modern handling of Maori themes should buy the book and read it.