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Campbell, Meg
Writer's File

Meg Campbell

Deceased
Campbell, Meg
In brief
Meg Campbell was a poet. She published several collections of poetry and her writing appeared in a range of literary journals and magazines. Her poems can be seen to traverse the difficult territory of family, illness, and religion, and many are strongly rooted in the Kāpiti Coast region, where she lived with her husband, author Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, for several decades. Vivienne Jepsen wrote that in Campbell’s poems, ‘The image of suffering is precisely poised between the momentous and the everyday.’
  • Primary publisher
    HeadworkX Publishers
Bio

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Campbell, Meg (1937 - 2007) was a poet whose work is noted for its fearless emotional honesty. She has published four collections: The Way Back (1981), A Durable Fire (1982), Orpheus and Other Poems (1990), and The Better Part (2000). Her poems have appeared in journals including NZ Listenerand Landfall, and she was one of four poets published in How Things Are (1998).

The poems often traverse the difficult territory of family, illness, and religion, but critics have noted an increasing lightness of touch in Campbell's later work. In The Dominion, Vivienne Jepsen writes of the poems in How Things Are: 'Meg Campbell is a more playful poet than she has seemed before. The image of suffering is precisely poised between the momentous and the everyday.'

Meg Campbell has also written an unpublished autobiographical novel. Many of her poems are strongly rooted in the Kāpiti Coast region, where she lived with her husband Alistair Te Ariki Campbell since the early 1960s.


Campbell's collection Resistance was released in 2004; the collection Poems Adrift was published in 2007.

Meg Campbell died in November 2007.

It's Love Isn't It (HeadworX), a joint collection of love poems by Meg Campbell and Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, was published in 2008.

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