At the first blast a lion

Sprang from a furnace

It crouched down on its paws

and become a range of mountains

At the second blast of the trumpet

The hilltops whitened

In a trance in a blond paddock

Cattle waited motionless

But despite the rich spareness of many poems the old ‘singing line’ is still to be found, as in ‘A Lark’:

            Lost in a blue room like a dreaming girl

Practising scales. Then song -

Each song perfect and each song the same

As full of light as on the day it came

Unbidden in an unguarded hour. The bird

Opened its beak and sang the thing it knew

My love, my love - a bluer blue than blue.

The work was done. The song is always true.

Larks found no need to change.

What I find impressive in so many of these poems is the deftness with which a natural image is used suggestively, far more so than in the work of the 50s and 60s:

            The hawk’s shadow slides

Through summer grass

Tracing contour and hollow

To pause fluttering below

The hawk like a lover.

The hawk from its hover

Drops on a small

Animal in its shadow,

In this act devours

And renews itself.

‘Deft’ is again the word for the easy capturing of impressions in a phrase, as when two fish float among debris ‘like canvas stones’, and (in the same poem) for the apt use of the colloquial: ‘a hawk homes in/Hooked on the smaller fish’.

Much has been said about Campbell’s delight in the natural world, and rightly so. It’s to be found in this book too, but as some of these passages show delight doesn’t blind him to the dark aspects of the human and natural cycles. The hawk with its shadow is hooked on death, and death, as we might expect in poems by a dying man, appears quite often here: but discreetly, and as Geoff Page says, ‘completely without complaint or self-pity’. David Campbell was dying of cancer: hence this poem, ‘Crab’:

            The crab sidled out

From its hiding place

Beneath my shoulder-blade

Fending with one enlarged claw

It scuttled sideways

And settled in an outcropping elbow

It left tiptoe tracks

It, rite hard sands of the ulna

Pain broke on the white beach

The crab has reached my hand

In the dreck at the high-tide line

Look what I have found.

About death the poet can also be grimly wry:

Skeletons are very cold

Without flesh or skin

We huddle around the stove

Pulling our denim about us ...

Don’t touch me she says

Don’t dare touch me

With your chalky dead claw

I don’t know how we ever could

And instead of ‘confessional’ protest, Campbell in the title-poem offers a strange new vision of the ancient ritual death of the one for the many, all of them involved in the life-death process:

            Flick

And the man in the honeysuckle

Crackles like pork, young leaves of flame

Clambering over the black framework.

We didn’t mean it, didn’t mean…

The farmers say it will be a good season.

Nearly everything I’ve quoted comes from the first half of the book (though in the second I must mention ‘The Red Telephone Box’ and the celebrated ‘Duchesses’). Why is this? Because while I agree that it would be foolish to think of Campbell as merely a ‘pastoral’ poet, I think that in this book, as in most of his work, the best poems are those which draw on country imagery, and in The Man in the Honeysuckle this imagery is most frequently early on. The more ‘surrealist’ effects of later poems leave me less satisfied.

While the collection as a whole has a marked unity (most noticeable in the subtle inter-echoing of the early poems), the fifth section, ‘Secret Lives (Poems and Imitations)’, does something to lessen this effect. But here too the best moments, for me at least, are those where the poet’s imagination turns once more to the country, as in the first two of ‘Three Looks at Lenin’ or in part of ‘The Secret Life of a Leader’.

All in all, though, this is a powerful, varied and compact book. Written though it was in illness, it shows no slackening of poetic energy but rather one more advance. It is a brave book: one to honour as well as to be grateful for.