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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Introduction [to Alistair Campbell’s Mine Eyes Dazzle]

Introduction [to Alistair Campbell’s Mine Eyes Dazzle]

The work of Alistair Campbell has been recognised an event in New Zealand poetry – vigorous, original, with the best qualities of the Romantic tradition. He is that rare phenomenon, a poet who writes from the heart withoutpage 80 sentimentality or self-dramatisation.

The ‘Elegy’, first published in Landfall, contains some of the best symbolist poetry written in New Zealand and will in its strength and clarity compare with the work of English poets such as Dylan Thomas. Seldom has any poet in his first volume shown so sure a control of speech-rhythms and sensuous imagery.

The poems which have been added to this new edition demonstrate his continued capacity to draw on sources of primitive and animistic feeling denied to most. Yet it would be false to regard Campbell as a ‘primitive’. Like Keats’s poetry, his art, though sensuous, is the product of a controlled imagination. Only where the control slackens do his poems lose clarity.

For a full appreciation of Campbell it is necessary that his poems be read aloud. The free use of assonance conveys many overtones where the immediate meaning of the verse may appear uncomplex. Campbell’s world is in the main a pagan one, of hard clear lines and masculine energy, under the heat of the meridian sun. Yet he worships, I think, Artemis rather than Aphrodite: his sentiments are, whether directly or obliquely, idealistic. One must consider it fortunate that the Pegasus Press has elected to produce this revised and extended edition of his work.

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