When Speak with the Sun appeared in 1949, Douglas Stewart claimed in the Bulletin that it was more Australian in imagery and feeling than any verse written here since Banjo Paterson. Stewart was struck by the pieces about drovers, shearers, stockmen, sundowners, trappers and other outback figures – by Campbell’s link to the old bush songs and ballads. But Campbell’s title had been drawn from Henry Vaughan (‘At midnight speak with the sun’), and though there is a sense of a popular Australian tradition in his work, his poems are far more sophisticated than Stewart gave them credit for. They draw on Elizabethan lyrics, pastoral songs, metaphysical contemplations. When I read Speak with the Sun again recently, it struck me as being one of the most poignant Australian books to have emerged from World War II. Of course, it contains the haunting ‘Men in Green’, which has found its place in the best anthologies of war poems, as well as the widely admired ‘Soldier’s Song’, but there are several others that deserve to be better known.

For those of us who were starting to discover Australian poetry in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Campbell was the poet who first introduced the daylight moon and the blond paddocks and hills of the Monaro into our verse. I can still recall reading ‘The Monaro’ in the Bulletin in 1951:

Willy Gray has a ten mile stare
And his eyes are droving with a dream of sheep
Down raddled stock-routes to tread white air
Where Willy Gray has a thought as deep
And rounded as a river-stone –
And over the paddocks goes the daylight moon.

At the time, this poem reminded me of figures I had seen in the very different landscape of the Huon in the Tasmania of my green years, but it already gathers together some of the dominant images and themes of Campbell’s poetry. Images of roundness: eggs of rounded song, rounded river stones, the twin bare hills like comforting maternal breasts – the whole poem suggesting a world of nourishment, completion and transcendent love:

Willy Gray has a lover’s eye
And it goes over the twin bare hills
And the blond paddocks to the bleached sky
Until it has come to a thought that fills
His mind with tenderness for this wild
Upland country and her suckling child.

Campbell’s poetry reflects many of the changes in his life and in the Australia of his time. We have no biography so far, and there are some aspects of his poetry and development that remain obscure. I remember Ray Mathew telling me in the early 1950s that there was some talk about Campbell’s becoming a Catholic (there were a number of conversions in the air and a renewed interest in Catholicism as the Cold War took hold). There is certainly a deeply spiritual dimension in poems such as ‘Who Points the Swallow’, ‘Perceptions’ and ‘Windy Gap’, as well as religious imagery in ‘Cocky’s Calendar’ and elsewhere.

W.B. Yeats is a dominant influence in the first phase of his poetry. Campbell had a remarkable way of absorbing the work of other writers and of bending it to his own concerns, but by the mid-1960s, with the arrival of the Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (1964) and the various volumes in the Penguin Modern European Poets series, his work started to move in different directions. Formal changes in a poet’s work are usually associated with imaginative changes. Campbell never completely abandoned the use of traditional stanzas and rhyme schemes, though he started to approach them differently. Textures often become harsher, poems less mellifluously rounded and shaped. He learned new strategies from writers like Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub and Vasko Popa, as well as from Americans such as Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, who showed him fresh ways of writing about family history. The Japanese led to haiku adaptations such as ‘Bikinis’ and the Ku-Ring-Gai Rock Carvings variations. Like a number of purely lyrical poets, he tried to extend his range by weaving single lyrics into sets, cycles and series. ‘Cocky’s Calendar’ and ‘Works and Days’ are the best known of these, but there are many others, such as ‘Starting from Central Station’, ‘Red Bridge’ and ‘Deaths and Pretty Cousins’. His accelerated rate of production in his last years started to alarm some publishers. His Collected Poems (Ginninderra Press, $20 pb, 132 pp, 1740273737) is far from complete; a large amount of material has still not appeared in book form.

There is something seriously wrong with poetry publishing in Australia. It is now nearly twenty years since Campbell’s Collected Poems appeared. It is no longer possible to obtain volumes by poets of the calibre of Judith Wright, Douglas Stewart, James McAuley or Francis Webb. We have no library of the work of our best poets in print. Angus & Robertson used to produce a fine series of A&R Modern Poets, but that has fallen by the wayside.

In 1994, Les Murray edited Fivefathers, a collection of five earlier Australian poets from the 1920s to the 1960s, which included a generous selection of David Campbell’s lyrics, but there are aspects of Campbell’s work that need to be seen in the context of his whole oeuvre. In the meantime, Philip Mead’s enterprising selection and its judicious introduction could serve to whet the appetite of a new generation for the work of one of our finest poets.