Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell ONZM (25 June 1925 – 16 August 2009) was a poet, playwright, and novelist.

Born in the Cook Islands, he was the son of a Cook Island Māori mother and a Pākehā father, who both died when he was young, leading to him growing up in a New Zealand orphanage.

He became a prolific poet and writer, with a lyrical and romantic style tempered by a darkness borne out of his difficult childhood and struggles with mental health as a young adult.

Campbell was born in Rarotonga, on 25 June 1925, and spent his early years on Penrhyn atoll or Tongareva.

His mother, Teu Bosini, was Cook Island Māori, and his father, John Archibald (Jock) Campbell, was a Pākehā New Zealander of Scottish descent.

His father was a former World War I soldier who worked on the island as a successful trader.

In 1932, when Campbell was seven, his mother died from what may have been tuberculosis.

The following year, his father also died after becoming an alcoholic.

Campbell was sent with his younger brother, Bill, to live with their grandmother in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand.

She already had care of their two older siblings.

She was however unable to cope with the four children given the Great Depression and sent the children to an orphanage in 1934, where Campbell spent the next six years.

In later life, he said that he did not remember the years after his father's death due to his grief.

Although he spoke little English at the time of the move to New Zealand, he quickly learnt, and found the books in the orphanage to be a refuge from his feelings of abandonment.

He attended Otago Boys' High School, where he did well academically and in sports, but experienced racism from other students due to his Cook Island heritage.

He began writing poetry around this time.

He studied first at the University of Otago and then attended Victoria University of Wellington off and on between 1944 and 1952, while working various menial jobs to support himself.

His oldest brother, Stuart, was killed while serving with the Māori Battalion in Italy in 1945.

At the University of Otago he became good friends with James K. Baxter, another famous New Zealand poet.

It was dedicated to his friend Roy Dickson who had died in a mountaineering accident in 1947, having previously accompanied Campbell on trips to central Otago.

In 1949 his poem "The Elegy" was published in Landfall, marking his first significant publication.

He became a part of the Wellington Group in the 1950s, a group of poets who saw themselves as having a different perspective to Allen Curnow, another notable New Zealand poet, and through this group became friends with James K. Baxter and others.

In this time he was a founder and editor of two literary magazines, Hilltop and Arachne.

Campbell's first poetry collection, Mine Eyes Dazzle, was published in 1950.

The poem was set to music by his friend, composer Douglas Lilburn, in 1951.

It was the first book published by the Pegasus Press, and was reprinted in 1951 and 1956.

The first part of the book was his poem "The Elegy", and it also featured love poems about unattainable and beautiful women; the title of the book combined both themes, having been taken from a line in The Duchess of Malfi: "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young".

His writing was known for being lyrical and romantic in style, if somewhat dark, and his early poetry did not mention his Cook Islands heritage.

In 1952 he married his first wife, the poet Fleur Adcock; they had two sons but divorced six years later.

The two remained on good terms in later years.

In 1953 he graduated from Victoria with a Bachelor of Arts, and the following year he obtained a teaching diploma from Wellington Teachers' College.

After obtaining his teaching diploma, Campbell taught for a short period at Newtown School in Wellington, and subsequently became the editor of the New Zealand School Journal from 1955 to 1972.

He married his second wife, Aline Margaret (Meg) Anderson, in 1958; she was a young actress who would later become a poet herself, and they had a son and two daughters together.

In 1961 they moved to Pukerua Bay near Wellington, and would live there for the rest of their lives.

In the same year he wrote a novel for children, The Happy Summer (1961).

During his early working life Campbell experienced some mental breakdowns as he recovered from his childhood experiences, and his wife also suffered from severe post-natal depression.

He was also inspired by New Zealand's history, with a sequence in the collection Sanctuary of Spirits (1963) featuring narration by the nineteenth-century Ngāti Toa leader Te Rauparaha.

These experiences led him to turn to writing and explore his troubles in poetry; in a 1969 interview he said: "It was almost as if the springs of creativity had become iced over ... my nervous breakdown cracked the ice and allowed the spring to flow once more."

Although he wrote about Māori culture from his earliest works, after a revelatory return to the Cook Islands in 1976, his later works increasingly featured Pasifika culture and themes.

He received a number of notable awards during his lifetime including the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry and Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, and is considered one of New Zealand's foremost poets as well as a pioneer of Pasifika literature written in English.

In 2001 the sequence was adapted into a ballet and performed as part of the Kapiti Arts Festival.