Roy Campbell - Selected poems by Michael Chapman

ISBN: 9780868522319

Ad Donker Publishers, December 1999

160 pages, Paperback

Roy Campbell's poetry is as much loved and lauded by his South African peers as by an international following. This new Selected poems returns to print the range of his achievements from his long poem The Flaming Terrapin (1924) to the splendid translations of European poetry in the year prior to his death in 1957, in a car accident. Born in Durban in 1901, Campbell made his mark on South African poetry with lyrics and satires of vividness and power including 'To Pet a 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. 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 classic form. Roy Campbell - Selected poems confirms the continuing appeal of arguably the first South Africa poet of true stature.