Spring 2016, Volume 7, Issue 3

. Poetry Notes Spring 2016 Volume 7, Issue 3 ISSN 1179-7681 Quarterly Newsletter of PANZA clearly produced with love, but none of Inside this Issue Welcome them was able to present the full range and power of Alistair’s poetry as this one Hello and welcome to issue 27 of does. That was partly due to his strange Welcome Poetry Notes, the newsletter of PANZA, insecurity: he could never quite believe 1 the newly formed Poetry Archive of in his own work, so that he selected and Nelson Wattie on Alistair New Zealand Aotearoa. deselected and also altered and rewrote Te Ariki Campbell Poetry Notes will be published quarterly poems up to the moment they went to and will include information about press, and beyond. He can’t do that with goings on at the Archive, articles on this book, and now we can read it Tributes to Bob Dylan historical New Zealand poets of interest, through from cover to cover – a strategy 3 and Leonard Cohen occasional poems by invited poets and a I recommend – to get a wonderful record of recently received donations to overview of the shifting images and the Archive. music of his words. Report on the East-West Articles and poems are copyright in the Poetry Fest We’ve grown accustomed to seeing the 4 names of the individual authors. older Alistair on the covers of his books, The newsletter will be available for free but the first thing that strikes the eye here Comment on Richard download from the Poetry Archive’s is the fresh photograph of the poet at Berengarten website: thirty-one, in 1956, at the time he was 5 married to Fleur Adcock and living with http://poetryarchivenz.wordpress.com her in Tinakori Road. Alistair and Fleur Poetry by David Karena- are the parents of one of the book’s Holmes editors, Andrew Campbell, who joined Nelson Wattie on with his friend Robert Sullivan, poet and expert on Pacific Island cultures, and New publications by Alistair Te Ariki also with the forces of VUP to produce PANZA members this book. They all deserve our warmest 6 Campbell thanks. Now the fires of controversy have Donate to PANZA through Editor, lecturer, researcher, poet and PayPal cooled. In the past some of Alistair’s 8 biographer Nelson Wattie presents his critics complained that he wrote too launch speech (20 October 2016) from exclusively of his private affairs. The Recently received the recently published book The Collected Poems implicitly refutes that. donations Collected Poems of Alistair Te Ariki What strikes one now is the wide variety Campbell (Victoria University Press) of voices that speak in the poems. The About the Poetry Archive editors have sorted them into six It’s a special delight for me to hold this sections, and in each of them it is a book in my hands because I believe it different poetic voice that predominates. will make clear for the very first time Not only that: within each section there PANZA precisely why Alistair Te Ariki Campbell is a chorus of voices. Sequences like 1 Woburn Road deserves his place in the front rank of “Sanctuary of Spirits”, “Gallipoli” and Northland New Zealand’s creative spirits. Earlier “28 (Maori) Battalion” are deliberately Campbell volumes were often exquisite, Wellington 6012 designed as patterns of voices . Spring 2016 representing various points of view. But Alistair also gave a poetic voice to the greatly missed having a family with other poems also imply a speaker, not Cook Islands, where he spent his early parents. As a teenager he found a necessarily the poet, in a difficult, childhood. They speak and sing through substitute family with the Robertsons at amusing, romantic, loving, alien or many parts of his work, but most notably an orchard in Central Otago. He loved domestic situation, each with his or her perhaps in the sequence of twenty poems working in the orchard and he loved the unique voice. Reading Campbell is like called “Soul Traps”. In my own opinion family atmosphere. Even after coming to listening to a kaleidoscopic play of the Soul Traps are the most beautiful Wellington he spent summer weeks at voices. What they have in common is the poems ever written in New Zealand, but the orchard and persuaded some of his ineffable, mysterious, often melancholy there have always been readers who find friends to go down for fruit picking. music that is so characteristic of the poet them difficult. That’s an illusion. The Fleur Adcock once hiked down the South himself. reader may be distracted by unfamiliar Island in the company of Barry Mitcalfe, The many human voices are joined by names and words like Omoka, Nahe and sleeping in barns, hay stacks and school voices of places. Late in life, the great Pauma. They can be explained, but halls. Their destination was “Alistair’s” Irish poet, W B Yeats, claimed with before that you should just read the orchard and it was with Alistair that she satisfaction that he had given a voice to poems, preferably more than once, until returned. the seacliffs of his native land. Alistair the musical words sink into your mind. The Otago landscape remained special has given voices to several distinct There they act like seeds that will grow for Alistair to the end of his life. Once I landscapes that sing to us in his poems. into images within you and those images, mentioned apple varieties that we no Most familiar to this audience, perhaps, your own personal ones, will give shape longer seem to see, and he launched into is the Kapiti Coast. Alistair lived most of to the poems, no matter what external a joyous list of their names. It sounded his life with Meg in a modest house at references are intended. like a poem. He must have named about Pukerua Bay placed on a prominence In “Elegy for Anzac Day” there is twenty varieties of apples and I could like a castle. Now it is the home of their another Pacific place, Tahiti, and please imagine him at the orchard eating a daughter, Mary, and it’s inseparable from let me read a brief excerpt to illustrate purloined apple, with juice flowing over our image of the Campbell family. The the way the place speaks for itself: “And his chin and hands. Of course fruit trees poems arising from it are filled with now / the palm trees / crack their are not native to New Zealand and for sounds. The wind and rain that batter it knuckles, / as a puff of wind / from the me this love of the orchard in the are natural forces but are also filled with outgoing tide / spins and dances, / lifting spectacular primeval valley with pristine spirits. The great island of Kapiti is droplets / of fine mist, / rises / glancing mountains in view is a reminder that the called a “Sanctuary of Spirits” and the off the / creaking fronds, / collapses / in land of this country is a blend of the spirits in Alistair’s poems and novels fatigue…” native and the imported, just as Alistair’s deserve our attention. They are not I’ll pass over the poems of the Southern poetry is a blend of Polynesian and imposed on the landscape by the poet’s Alps, such as “The Return” and “Elegy”, European traditions. intellect, imagination or will. They are because they are perhaps the most The short poem I’ll read ‘Cromwell there as much as the calling seabirds or familiar. I’ll just say again that we will Gorge’ is set in a place that has now been the sparrows that play on the lawn. understand them best if we realise that flooded under an enormous hydro- Sometimes in the Campbell house a book the land itself is speaking through the electricity lake. or a vase would fall from a shelf or a poet. Let me quote W B Yeats again: door would suddenly slam although no “Man can embody truth but he cannot wind was apparent. Alistair and Meg know it.” That’s a poet’s attitude. always knew which spirit had caused Although Alistair was very widely read, such an event and why. It might be an he always denied that he was an ancestor, an unborn child or the troubled intellectual. The intellectual’s task is to spirit of someone still alive. Whoever it know, the poet’s to embody. Before was, they were sending a message. Alistair Campbell there were poets, some Something Alistair or Meg had said or of them highly regarded, who wrote done had disturbed a spirit. Similarly, about New Zealand. Alistair wrote New when we read of the warrior chieftain Te Zealand. Rauparaha rattling at the windows of the I’m going to conclude by reading a poem house, we will understand that best if we from Central Otago. After both his respect the poet’s sense that the old parents had died, Alistair came from the fighter was actually there. For my own Cook Islands to Dunedin. He was seven part I can sense the spirits of Alistair and years old. He spent the rest of his Meg here, in this space, now. They loved childhood in an orphanage, where he bookshops, and where else should they often got into mischief. One of the spirits be but here where so many family that always inhabited Alistair was Maui, members and friends are assembled? and his laughter was unforgettable. At that time he depended on his siblings but 2 . Poetry Archive Echoes of Mr. Yeats’ hymn Times have changed so much, they’ve Tributes to Bob Dylan And a thousand singsong others remained the same and Leonard Cohen by Expressing in thought, word, music like your friend, Woody Michael O’Leary The all too familiar taste of dust and SO LONG LEONARD COHEN death Beginning life as a middle-class son Recalling the desolate row Comfortable in your Jewish Catholicism Of houses in Margaret Street Tailor-made for the family’s business Now either destroyed or gentrified You chose the more difficult artist’s must we really

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