Why Don't You Talk To Me? by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Why do I post my love letters
in a hollow log?
Why put my lips to a knothole in a tree
and whisper your name?

The spiders spread their nets
and catch the sun,
and by my foot in the dry grass
ants rebuild a broken city.
Butterflies pair in the wind,
and the yellow bee,
his holsters packed with bread,
rides the blue air like a drunken cowboy.

More and more I find myself
talking to the sea.
I am alone with my footsteps.
I watch the tide recede
and I am left with miles of shining sand.

Why don't you talk to me?




                                       Editor: Tim Jones

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (1925–2009) is my favourite New Zealand poet. While Allen Curnow and James K Baxter were conventionally regarded, during the high nationalist (and masculinist) period of New Zealand poetry, as the twin titans of New Zealand poetry – or perhaps, for aspiring poets, its Scylla and Charybdis – Alistair Campbell's poetry, rooted in observation and experience rather than poetic ideology, speaks more directly to me.

Kapiti: Selected Poems 1947–71 was, if I recall correctly, the first collection of New Zealand poetry I bought. While some of the early poems in this selection, such as "The Return" (1949), are magnificent, it was the increasing simplicity, freshness and directness of address of the later poems in the book that especially impressed and (I hope) influenced me.

"Why Don't You Talk To Me?", written in 1965, has all these qualities, plus a cunning indirection. For much of the poem, the central question is present only by implication: the natural world makes its customary arrangements all around me, yet I am separate; why don't you talk to me? This poem says all that needs to be said, and no more.

For more information about Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, see his Wikipedia and New Zealand Book Council pages and his obituary in The Guardian.

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Publication Information

Published in Alistair Campbell, Kapiti: Selected Poems 1947-71, and reprinted in Harvey McQueen, ed., These I Have Loved (Steele Roberts, 2010). Reproduced as a Tuesday Poem by kind permission of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell's literary executor.

Tim Jones is a poet, author, editor and blogger. His latest book is his third poetry collection, Men Briefly Explained. His short story "The New Neighbours" has been included in the recently-published anthology The Apex Book of World SF 2. For more on Tim and his writing, please see his blog Books in the Trees.

Once you have read "Why Don't You Talk To Me?", please take the opportunity to read the poems which the individual Tuesday Poets have posted on their blogs. You'll see them linked from the sidebar at the left of this page.

To Stuart by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Early spring, and a cold wet morning.      The wind mooches about outside,           planning a home invasion. It’s Mary’s birthday, our Mary whom      you’d have loved had the Fates           spared you. I take you back five years before you joined      the Maori Battalion, and six before you           died. I have many questions to put to you, many that may not even have      an answer. Why being blessed with           enviable gifts did you abandon your studies after only a year?      You could have made your mark           in any field that calls for passion and imagination.      As a boy I followed you about           from match to match marvelling at what you created with a       cricket ball. Your bowling           action and the flight of the ball, gathering speed as it flew      towards its target, were to me            a work of art. As an admiring younger brother, I celebrate      this image of what you promised           and never lived to fulfil. ‘Nature,’ wrote William Blake,      ‘has no Outline, but Imagination has.’           I see you turn and run up to the crease. I see your      arm swing over. I see the            ball in flight – and that is all.

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

I selected this poem because of its personal connection with the Maori Battalion, and my admiration for Alistair Te Ariki Campbell who was the first Polynesian poet to have a book published in English, the spectacularly successful Mine Eyes Dazzle (Pegasus Press, 1950, 1951, 1956) with an Oxford revised edition called Wild Honey in 1964.

Campbell’s brother Stuart (named in his ‘Personal Sonnets’ as 446853 Private S.A. Campbell) was killed as a result of ‘friendly fire’ in 1945 while waiting to cross the Santerno River near Massa Lombarda, Italy. An RAF Bomber tragically dropped a 500 pound bomb near Stuart’s D Company unit of the 28^th Maori Battalion. The poem shows the younger brother’s admiration for Stuart, and the tremendous promise that was never realized in Stuart whose sharpness of mind and athleticism is captured in the poignant image of the cricket ball in flight that never lands.

Campbell was continuously revising. In a previously published version of the poem the quote from Blake in the penultimate ‘stanza’ uses ‘Art’ rather than this most recent version which uses ‘Imagination’. It’s a revealing re-vision, emphasizing a five-senses aesthetic rather than the highly abstract term art. The quote also grounds Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s poem in Blake’s English tradition of visionary poetry, while keeping it in the same field of play as cricket, and the promises of university study “…that calls for passion and imagination.” It also shows Campbell’s tremendous artistry, continuing to reshape work well after it was first published.

There are technical aspects to notice. I put stanza in inverted quotes above because the poem moves in eleven stanza-like tercets. The tercet pattern:  the first line far-left, the second line indented, then the third line further indented, cleverly creates small spaces in the long-flowing lyric, or ‘spots in time’ during the bowler’s run-up and then release. The maestro also lays a regular pattern of three stresses per line, creating a sweet or dolce music when speaking of his deceased brother.

Campbell returned and returned to the theme of his brother’s death, perhaps beginning with his famous 1948-49 sequence ‘Elegy’ which mourned his friend the mountain climber Roy Dickson’s death, but  contains an edge of familial grief conjuring his brother’s recent death; through to the 1960 ‘Personal Sonnets I’, 1964’s ‘Grandfather Bosini’ who calls out for Maireriki (Stuart’s Tongarevan name) and then dies, and the 2001 Maori Battalion sequence where this poem “To Stuart” first appeared. An enduring theme of the orphaned Campbell’s poetry was family, and his yearning to re-connect with them.

More on Alistair Te Ariki Campbell here and here. The poem is posted with the kind permission of Andrew Campbell.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is poet Robert Sullivan of Maori (Ngā Puhi, Kai Tahu) and Galway Irish descent. He has won several NZ literary awards for his poetry, children's writing and editing. His poetry collections include Star Waka, Captain Cook in the Underworld, Voice Carried My Family, and his most recent: Cassino City of Martyrs (Huia) and Shout Ha! to the Sky (Salt Publishing, UK). 


Robert co-edited Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri. Robert is the new Head of the School of Creative Writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, and before that, directed Creative Writing at the University of Hawai'i.  He blogs here.