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ALISTAIR TE ARIKI CAMPBELL was born in the Cook Islands in 1926 and is half-Polynesian. He moved to New Zealand in 1933 and now lives at Pukerua Bay on the Kapiti Coast, north of Wellington. He has written numerous books of verse on Maori and Polynesian themes as well as a number of novels.
Campbell comments: “‘It’s Greece’ comes from Maori Battalion. A Poetic Sequence, which tells of the exploits of a unique military force drawn from the Maori race of New Zealand, whose legendary fighting qualities on the battlefields of Greece, Crete, North Africa, and Italy, made them both feared and respected. The sequence comprises 72 poems in which members of the battalion, sometimes during battles or in the calm between, sometimes even from beyond the grave, reflect on war in all its violence and brutality, and what they relate with compassion and humanity, and often with irrepressible humour, is intended to leave the reader with a sense of the tragedy and futility of war. The sequence is dedicated to my brother Stuart, who served in the Maori Battalion and was killed a few weeks before the war in Europe ended.”
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