Two interests especially bonded the two men: trout fishing and poetry. The first was a recreation that brought them both – and sometimes their families – together year after year, despite their busy lives. But if fishing was the recreation of choice, poetry was the stuff of life itself. Meg Stewart remembers the poets’ language that lit up the talk over the whiskies her father served when Campbell was an honoured guest in suburban St Ives near Sydney. The same language added its potent magic to the conversations that lingered over dinners in the long country nights at the Campbell property at Palerang, near Bungendore. In her foreword to this book of letters, Meg recalls those ‘inimitable times’ when the two men spoke as poets. Their words were spellbinding, and their language was their own, in which ‘the lilt of a line, the shape of a stanza and the intricate delicacies of rhyme [were] felt with unique passion’.

Jonathan Persse is the thoughtful and inspired editor of this representative selection of the more than 430 letters exchanged between Campbell and Stewart from 1946 to 1979. In giving us over two hundred of those letters, drawn from public collections in Canberra and Sydney, Persse allows readers to share something of the experience that Meg Stewart and her mother, the artist Margaret Coen, enjoyed in sharing their lives with figures who survive in our Australian pantheon as two of the country’s loved and admired poets. Where mere conversations – however charged and brilliant – might have seen their brief magic dissipated into the ether, in their particular circumstances of distance and separation, two Australian men found time to put onto paper their thoughts and responses to the world around them. Here, the creative energy of their discourse was distilled into something more enduring. Their letters serve now as a window onto the creative process of poetry itself, surely that most intimate and intensely personal of literary forms. In its turn, this book becomes a laboratory for ideas, a testing place for lines and images as two poets – shyly at first, but with growing confidence and trust – share their drafts and trust their creative processes to the thoughtful scrutiny each offered the other. The book is enriched by the inclusion of many of the finished poems we perceive first as sketches or ideas in the letters.

As Persse observes, the letters shared between Campbell and Stewart became the means not for any talk of politics, or sport, or world events – nor, indeed, for ‘news’ of any conventional kind. For some, at first, this absence may seem surprising, but quickly the magic Meg Stewart knew asserts itself. Douglas Stewart himself summed up the essence of the correspondence in the last letter he wrote to his old friend. By then deep into the writing of his autobiography, Stewart had put poetry briefly to one side. But in the letter he received from Campbell at the beginning of June 1979, he responded, as he had done so many times before, to Campbell’s deft and brilliant evocation of nature. This time though, as Campbell wrote of ‘king parrots in the apple tree’ and of currawongs talking ‘of blue distances’, he was ill and looking out, not on his own broad acres, but at the enclosed view offered by a garden in suburban Canberra. Still, the images were country ones, and they reminded Stewart of past letters where whatever happened to be outside Campbell’s window or seen in a morning’s walk – hawk or swallow or dabchick – lifted a letter into poetry. Stewart remarked that ‘king parrots in the apple tree’ looks very like writing to him. Connoisseurship is one of the hallmarks of these letters. They will bring a quiet pleasure to readers and writers alike.