Short description
Roy Campbell's poetry is much loved and lauded by his South African peers as well as receiving international acclaim. This new Selected Poems returns to print the range of his achievement from his long poem The Flaming Terrapin (1924) to the splendid translations of European poetry in the years prior to his death in 1957 in a car accident.
Long description
Born in Durban in 1901 Campbell made his mark on South African poetry with lyrics and satires of vividness and power including 'To a Pet Cobra', 'Rounding the Cape', 'The Zebras' and 'A Veldt Eclogue: The Pioneers'. Just as the sights, sounds and colours of Africa attracted his talents, so did the world of the Mediterranean where, in Spain and Portugal, he spent the greater part of his adult life. Paying tribute to Campbell Lawrence Durrell wrote: 'A great huntsman ... he booms and roars and surges like the ocean breaking on the empty beaches of his native Africa'. To which Campbell's fellow South African contemporary Francis Carey Slater adds:
Soar again, young eagle, soar again –
Remain a spectacle of beauty and of awe
As Michael Chapman notes in his introduction to this edition, Campbell's unique strength is to be found in creative tensions between his romantic imagination and his sense of classical form. Roy Campbell - Selected Poems confirms the continuing appeal of arguably the first South African poet of true stature.