About the Author

After high school I worked on crews that travelled the U.S. doing field work for topographic maps. At age 21 I decided to be a painter and went to the Art Students League in New York, an atelier school in which students choose artist/instructors and work in studios free of academic requirements. I soon learned I would be a landscape painter (my preference for the outdoors asserting itself). During my second year at the League I was drafted into the Army for 2 years- in Korea for one of those years. Upon discharge I went to Italy, worked at landscape painting and discovered my passion for poetry, learning what I could by reading the great poetry of the past. In Florence I married an Englishwoman and had one daughter. Eventually we decided to separate. I returned to the U.S. after 7 years, realizing that in Italy I would forever be a visitor, and to develop in art I had to live within my native culture and landscape. I have lived in New York, Maine and now Massachusetts, making a living as a housepainter and carpenter, all the while continuing to write and paint, showing in New York and Boston galleries and beginning to publish poems, eventually in the Goose River annual Anthologies, leading up to this, my first published collection. I am married to Patricia Cobb, a visual artist, and we have two grown daughters.

Reviews

"I have been pleased to publish David Campbell's poetry in several issues of my publication since 2003, and happy to see two of them - 'Work' and 'Doctor King and the Expatriate'- included in his fine new collection, Arts and Animals. This collection focuses on such interests as artists he's appreciated, animals, and a concluding section on senior life. A visual artist himself, David is especially adept at wordplay, striking images, and strong musicality ('end-of-winter pine cones / gnawed to tattered spines / in squirrelish desperation'). From the subjects he chooses to the channeling of his thoughts into these poems, David guides us 'in my rootedness, having yet to find/ in the arrowing future a longing back / to a landscape maintained in the unsettled / heart and breath by music.' Readers will savor the journey, and his stops along the way."-David MessineoPublisher/Poetry EditorSensations Magazine