Shimmering in the Sun

This is a comprehensive, informative and reflective account of the life of the poet David Campbell. Campbell lived from 1915 to 1979 and the more than forty years since his death have not diminished the power and vision of his poems nor the value in continuing to read works of superlative craftsmanship; his eye for the natural world in its polarities; and the intellectual inquiry expressed in his verse. Persse’s book encouraged me to re-assemble my copies of Campbell’s poems and explore something more of their scope and what others have said about him. That kind of response may be the aim of the Life—to encourage reading and re-reading of the poems as the primary point of interest and encounter with the man who wrote them.

With regard to the school and university curriculum: the study of Campbell’s verse would be a wise matter for educators to pursue, as jewels amidst the more monetised disciplines. When R.F. Brissenden wrote “A Second Life through his Work” for the Australian in December 1989, ten years after Campbell’s death, at the time of the launch of Leonie Kramer’s edition of Campbell’s Collected Poems, he referred to poetry readings where a tiny audience “made up of other poets, reluctant friends, stray dogs and a handful of devoted followers” attend. But for Campbell’s poetry “the auditorium was packed out … attentive, responsive and enthusiastic”. Campbell’s poetry should be curriculum material today and Persse’s book encourages the reading of him afresh.

Persse includes primary documents: Leonie Kramer’s appreciation of Campbell from the Sydney Morning Herald of July 1979, just before Campbell’s funeral, and Manning Clark’s eulogy from it.

Campbell’s immersion in poetry began at The King’s School, Parramatta, and was intensified at Jesus College, Cambridge, under the deeply learned influence of Professor E.M.W. Tillyard, his tutor in English. Tillyard knew that Campbell was a poet of ability and potential by the time he left Cambridge in 1937, having achieved formal competency in the discipline of English over several centuries. Campbell also became a competent pilot in his Jesus College days, as well as being capped to play rugby for England. He remained in contact with Tillyard and Persse outlines Tillyard’s role in the 1949 publication of Campbell’s first book, Speak with the Sun: a coup to get this London publication.

Campbell’s distinctive war service in the RAAF is detailed in Chapter Six and includes documents (including the citation) relating to the operational near-catastrophe for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. This chapter opens vistas onto a vital time in Australia’s modern history and the realities of war service. The young English poet and tank commander Keith Douglas, who did not survive the war, comes to mind as a companion poet with the Campbell of those years. Campbell’s wartime Papua New Guinea poem “Men in Green” is included by Persse. Published in the Bulletin in 1943, it comes from that wartime period that Campbell’s contact with Douglas Stewart and the Bulletin began. Stewart was literary editor of the magazine from 1940 to 1961.

Persse began his publication of core Campbell material in Letters Lifted into Poetry: Selected Correspondence between David Campbell and Douglas Stewart 1946–1979 (2006). This and the biography can be read as companion volumes.

Persse’s new book is organised in twenty-six chapters. I think the book would have had greater organisational strength had one or more of the chapters focused on Campbell’s first and second marriages and given greater voice to the perspective of the principal women in his life. Bonnie Lawrance and Judy Jones do not come alive to any real extent in the text. That may be deliberate, or by necessity. As the novelist Susan Howatch once intimated, there are always stories that cannot be told. It does raise questions about the kind of biography one can write. David and Bonnie divorced in 1973 and he married again in 1974. Perhaps, in this context, I can note lines from Campbell’s “Orpheus in Hell”, which was included by Max Harris in Australian Poetry 1967:

But when he turned and looked at her, the doubt
And longing in his sharp inquiry came
To her like chiller water. She sang out
To think that her deliverer shared the same
Needs as herself; and as she turned about,
The shadow that she walked upon was lame.

Campbell is lauded as a lyric poet, a writer of intense observation of the natural world in its sensory and other impact on the human participant and observer. Some of this is captured definitively in Song for a Wren: Country Poems and Images (2009), which combines Campbell’s poems with the landscape photography of John Peel. He was also a balladist, with popular and accessible poems put before readers, sometimes in the daily press. But his greatness lay in what went beyond these forms in intellectual reflection and inquiry.

In the appreciation by Leonie Kramer, with which Persse closes his book, she notes that James McAuley had said of Campbell’s poems: “Implicit is a metaphysical sense of the way of things, and if they said ‘it is good’, they do so with knowledge of fragility and disaster and pain.” Reading Persse has awakened an awareness of things that Campbell and McAuley had in common. Both poets were influenced by Papua New Guinea. Both died relatively young and within three years of each other. Both took poetry and prose pursuits into what can be called metaphysical concerns. Some of these links even appear in specific poems.

Campbell’s final book, The Man in the Honeysuckle, published just after his death, includes a sequence called “Songs of Chance” which includes “The Greatest Show on Earth” in which chance as “a spangled magician … shuffles cards at the speed of light … [and] … pulls dead rabbits from his hat” while lovers stay preoccupied with the immediacy and luminosity of their naked embrace. In “The Cloak”, McAuley’s earlier poem from 1967, “Death the Magician”, in his crimson-lined cloak, always plays to a packed house and, on throwing his cloak over this or that “volunteer”, makes them disappear—to an afterlife somewhere we know not and can only imagine in exotic or even febrile ways. There is no reason why Campbell did not die on the mission over Rabaul when he lost a finger to fire from a Zero. Is it all the work of a “spangled magician”?

Campbell stays with embedded metaphysics from his earliest to his last poems. Persse notes this by drawing attention to the title poem of Speak with the Sun (1949). Here, the bird that sings in the glade, sings across ten thousand years of light. Heartbeats are “of the light” and whether it is the bird and its song, or the delight of the poet as listener and writer, “of such stuff the stars were made”. There is a sense for Campbell in which this is not just rhetoric but literally, though mysteriously, true. The metaphysics are only deepened in his final volume where, in the “Songs of Chance” sequence, “Green Hands” ponders what appears as the accident of existence and survival; or radical personal contingency, as one might put it more abstractly:

I have lain on my back in caves
Studying the hands of dead people
Stencilled in coloured ochres …
This morning under
An overhanging scanner
There were two hands on the screen …
One had a little finger missing.

This poem carries the trauma residue of the chance by which the military encounter in the air above Rabaul did not take the poet’s life, but by “a shuffling of the cards” took only his little finger. As a companion poem, one could read Gwen Harwood’s “Bone Scan” (1988).

Campbell and McAuley each wrote compelling poems about their parents, about their fathers in particular: another fruitful path radiating from re-engaging with Campbell via A Life of the Poet. But to note a metaphysical concern is not simply to note profound themes.

Brissenden explored this subject in “The Poetry of David Campbell: ‘Speak with the Sun’: Energy, Light and Love”, in Quadrant in October 1983. He described a connective layering between Campbell’s increasing insights into the subtle exchange or complementarity between light, energy and matter in modern physics and linked this to the insights of the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan. Persse notes the role of Capra’s The Tao of Physics. In what the poet sees, there is always more than what can be seen. Persse draws attention to lines from “Hear the Bird of Day” which ends, “In every grain of sand stands a singer in white. / What’s matter but a hardening of the light.” This is Blake-like.

A lyrical and descriptive poem becomes a participatory symbol by which poet and reader find a harmony and resolution of vastness in both the nano and macro that surround a human middle ground. While not the place to explore the classical Greek notion of symbolon and its rejoining of two separated halves that belong together, Persse alerts us to the need to acknowledge and respond to those depths and heights. It is clearly there in “Lizard and Stone”, the first poem of Campbell’s final collection:

Within the stone
A dance of atoms
Warms the basking lizard
The warmth of the lizard quickens the atoms
About the stone and the lizard
Where they lie like lovers
The cosmos dances.

There is a holistic vision of this universe in which the human, in its sensory and soul and fleshly dimension, is of the same ultimate stuff as the tiniest particle or energies and the vastness of the galaxy. Poems and poesis hold some of this together though the restless mind quests and wonders whether soul really is of the same quiddity as the constituent elements of the cosmos. Kevin Hart (one of the significant younger poets Campbell encouraged—a pantheon of excellence listed by Persse) included several of Campbell’s poems in his Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse (1994).

Campbell belonged to a generation of great poets for whom the classical world was a familiar matrix. W.H. Auden exemplified this with his “Shield of Achilles”. Campbell does the same in The Branch of Dodona and Other Poems. Thus, in 1949: “Have been reading The Odyssey to the children & they love it. In fact they say it is almost as good as The Magic Pudding.”

In The Branch of Dodona he uses the terrifying stories of Jason and Medea as a matrix for contemporary events, acquiring a new colloquial power for them, and for deeply relational and personal matters. “Incineration of a Bride” reworks the death of Glauce, King Creon’s daughter and Jason’s fiancée. It reworks the myth by introducing napalm, a twentieth-century invention. It opens another path for fruitful study in poetry and in wider fields. But it is reworked in a new poesis and not reduced to a cause or agenda pleasing to the zeitgeist.

In writing this review, I have tried to abridge comments to meet the apt constraint. Persse’s book is excellent and prompted me to rediscover and further explore this exceptional poet. It is fitting to close with lines from “The Dream”, a poem by Douglas Stewart, and based on a dream that his wife, Margaret, had after Campbell’s death. Persse uses this poem to end his earlier book Letters Lifted into Poetry. It plays to the metaphysical dimension in the domain of metamorphosis and transfiguration. It addresses death and is not overcome. Here is part of it:

She dreamed that summer he had become a cicada
And would not let the red earth hold him under
But shrugged it off, man-insect in her dream,
And climbed the bole of that white, scribbly gum
And tentatively, then clear and high and strong,
Sang the first stanzas of cicada song …
All green and gold and shimmering in the sun
He sprang into the air and he was gone.
Far off in ringing tress and noon’s blue height
She heard him singing with the tribes of light.

I permit myself a personal comment. Over the years, I had bought two second-hand copies of The Man in the Honeysuckle (1979). Reopening one of them for this review, I found that it had become the repository for a large number of folded and dated newspaper cuttings containing poems by Campbell and reviews and articles about him: a gift from the anonymous former owner who clearly knew and loved the poems and the poet.

I highly commend Persse’s book and the reading of Campbell’s poems.

David Campbell: A Life of the Poet
by Jonathan Persse
Australian Scholarly, 2020, 251 pages, $44

Ivan Head spent twenty-seven years as the head of Anglican colleges in the University of Tasmania and the University of Sydney.