David Campbell Biography

Australian poet, born in New South Wales, educated at Cambridge University. Campbell's first volume of poems, Speak With the Sun (1949), with its ballads portraying the characters and landscape of the Australian outback, and his highly acclaimed war poem ‘Men in Green’, established his early reputation as a distinctly Australian poet. The Miracle of Mullion Hill (1956) develops these themes but includes several meditative lyrics. Poems (1962) reflects more universal interests and includes a sequence of pastoral lyrics. In The Branch of Dodona and Other Poems, 1969–1970 (1970) he reworks the Jason and Medea legend in an acerbic commentary on contemporary life; Devil's Rock and Other Poems, 1970–1972 (1974) captures aspects of Aboriginal culture and includes memories of Kenneth Slessor and Douglas Stewart. Deaths and Pretty Cousins (1975) was followed by Words with a Black Orpington (1978) in which his technique becomes more experimental. Posthumous collections include The Man in the Honeysuckle (1979) and Collected Poems (1988). He was poetry editor of the Australian; edited a number of anthologies including Modern Australian Poetry (1970); and translated, with Rosemary Dobson, several volumes of Russian verse. His short stories, many of which drew on his childhood experiences of life on a sheep station, appeared in Evening Under Lamplight (1959) and Flame and Shadow (1976).