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I doubt if David Campbell (1915–1979) is still studied in Eng Lit courses at many Australian unis, but I hope he is fondly remembered and occasionally reread by more than just me. He and Martin Johnston share a posthumous moment in John Forbes's elegiac 'Lassù in Cielo'; a recent Poetica featured his correspondence with Douglas Stewart; lines and images from his poems arrive in my mind unbidden from time to time. Most of the poems in this selection are a strange mixture of the bucolic and the erudite (and just in case I've misused those words, I mean rustic and scholarly), and there's a pleasant music to them. When I read the sequence of twelve twelve-line rhyming poems of 'Cocky's Calendar', I found myself wondering how he managed to pick up his pen again after writing something so wonderful. Back in the early 1970s, in an Aust Lit seminar on this sequence, a student from North America totally didn't get them: while the rest of us were being drawn into the poetry's intensely personal relationship with the landscape, he lost patience altogether and said the whole thing read like verse you'd find on a Norman Rockwell calendar. I thought then that he was missing something, and I find I still do. ( )