Selected Poems

James K. Baxter (1926-1972) is one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable poets, yet he has been too little regarded of outside his native New Zealand. In this innovative selection, Paul Millar, the expert on Baxter, gathers his most powerful and celebrated poems – political, lyrical and spiritual – with some of his more unexpected writings, including previously unpublished work. The book is in four sections, representing the stages from Baxter’s early published work to his last vivid, inspiring and notorious years as a guru of the counter-culture. Each section has a biographical introduction. Notes, a glossary covering words and references unique to New Zealand, and a full bibliography, complete this essential celebration of Baxter’s poetry. Cover painting: Nigel Brown, Poet as Christ. Reproduced by permission of the artist and the Alex Baird Art Collection, College House, Christchurch, New Zealand. Cover design StephenRaw.com

Table of Contents:
Contents Introduction Note on the Text the 1940s Beyond the Palisade The Mountains Love-Lyric III Letter to Noel Ginn The First Forgotten University Song Envoi [to 'University Song'] High Country Weather Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness Odysseus Returned Soldier The Bay Sea Noon Let Time be Still Tunnel Beach Songs of the Desert, 8 ['As we have sown'] To my Father ['Today, looking at the flowering peach'] The Cave Farmhand Letter to Noel Ginn II Poem by the Clock Tower, Sumner Virginia Lake Hart Crane Wellington Rocket Show Wild Bees Poem in the Matukituki Valley the 1950s A Rented Room The Fallen House Cressida, 11: Her Decision The Bad Young Man The Homecoming Never No More The Surfman’s Story Perseus Spring Song Elegy at the Year’s End Lament for Barney Flanagan To my Father ['Dear friend, …'] The Giant's Grave Reflections on a Varsity Career Crossing Cook Strait Harry Fat and Uncle Sam A Rope for Harry Fat Husband to Wife In Fires of No Return By the Dry Cardrona At Hokianga Pyrrha At Akitio The Phoenix' Nest Song of the Years Howrah Bridge School Days This Indian Morning Night in Delhi Be Happy in Bed Elephanta Return to Exile Mr Baxter's Evening Liturgy Spring Song of a Civil Servant the 1960s The Sixties Ballad of Calvary Street Evidence at the Witch Trials Christchurch 1948 Winter To Our Lady of Perpetual Help On the Death of her Body Election 1960 A Dentist’s Window To a Samoan Friend At Raspberry Hut The Rubber Monkey A Family Photograph 1939 The Tree The Bureaucrats At Serrières The Hollow Place The Dying Nazi Guard The Town under the Sea Home Thoughts The Cold Hub Martyrdom The Iron Cradle Father to Son To Any Young Man who Hears my Verses Read in a Lecture Room An Ode to the Reigning Monarch on the Occasion of Her Majesty's Visit to Pig Island The Axe-Blade Shingle Beach Poem East Coast Journey Pig Island Letters The Waves Letter to Robert Burns Tomcat from The Holy Life and Death of Concrete Grady 1The Ballad of Grady’s Dream Thoughts of a Remuera Housewife To a Print of Queen Victoria Ballad of Nine Jobs A Bucket of Blood for a Dollar The Old Earth Closet The Lion Skin On Possessing the Burns Fellowship 1966 At Aramoana The Maori Jesus Daughter from Words to Lay a Strong Ghost 1The Party 12The Rock 13The Flower To my Father in Spring Travelling to Dunedin At Queenstown At the Fox Glacier Hotel Mother and Son At Kuri Bush At Brighton Bay Fitz Drives Home the Spigot Winter River Grandfather Iron Scythe Song The River At Naseby Reflections at Lowburn Ferry Air Flight North Winter Poem to my Wife Safety A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting Tangi The Rock Woman The Fear of Change Spring Summer 1967 The Caryatids The Doctrine Here The Black Star The Bargain Stephanie To Patric Carey Letter to Sam Hunt the jerusalem period [The book is shut] For Hone from Ballad of the Junkies and the Fuzz 1'O star I do not believe in' 3'Baron Saturday, baron of the cemeteries' 4'On the wall at the bottom of my bed' 5'It was necessary of course to invent the fuzz' Jerusalem Sonnets: Poems for Colin Durning Haere Ra The Labyrinth Meditation on my Father's Death Winter Monologue The Ikons Song for Sakyamuni from He Waiata mo taku Tangi 1'At the beginning of March' He Waiata mo Te Kare from Autumn Testament 1'As I come down the hill' 2'Wahi Ngaro, the void' 4'Wahi Ngaro, the gap' 5'Wahi Ngaro, now the ego' 6 'The darkness of oneself returns' 9'Groper with throats like buckets' 10'The mossgrown haloed cross' 11'At times when I walk' 14'Soon I will go South' 20'Somebody in my dream' 22'To pray for an easy heart' 25'Richard will not come here' 27'When I stayed those three months' 29'I think the Lord on his axe-chopped cross' 31'I tell the girls' 33'Mother, your statue' 36'This fine windy morning' 39'The centre of our dreaming' 42'The rata blooms explode' 44'This testament, a thing of rags and patches' 45'Tomorrow I’ll go down to Wellington' 46'After writing for an hour' 48'The spider crouching on the ledge' Te Whiore o te Kuri from Letter to Peter Olds 4'The revolution doesn’t need guns' from Five Sestinas 1Winter in Jerusalem 3The Dark Welcome Sestina of the River Road Sestina of the Makutu The Tiredness of Me and Herakles Ode to Auckland [Moss on plum branches] [A pair of sandals] Notes on the Poems Māori Glossary Glossary of Selected Non-Māori Words Select Bibliography Index of Titles Index of First Lines

About the Author :
James K. Baxter was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1926. He attended Quaker schools in New Zealand and England, and in 1944 enrolled at the University of Otago. He published his first collection of poetry, Beyond the Palisades, in the same year. He abandoned his course a year later, struggling with alcoholism, and from 1945 to 1947 took a series of manual jobs. He was baptised as an Anglican, and in 1948 married Jacqueline Sturm and published a further collection of poetry, Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, which confirmed his reputation as the pre-eminent poet of his generation. He published his third major collection, The Fallen House in 1953, and began to study at Victoria University in Wellington in the same year. After a brief period as a schoolteacher, Baxter worked on educational publications. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1954, and was greatly influenced by its principles; he was also increasingly drawn to Roman Catholicism, and in 1958 was received into the Church. His collection In Fires of No Return (1958), brought him international recognition. A UNESCO Fellowship enabled him to travel to Japan and India, and led to an increasingly critical attitude to New Zealand society, responses he explored in the poetry and plays of the 1960s. In 1966 Baxter was awarded a Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. He wrote poetry, plays and works of criticism prolifically, but in 1968 he left his university post, and his family, to establish a drop-in centre for drug addicts in Auckland. A year later, he began to create a commune at Jerusalem, a former mission station. His poetry collections Jerusalem Daybook (1971) and Autumn Testament (1972), explore his spiritual and practical experience of this period. Baxter died in Auckland in 1972 and was buried at Jerusalem in a funeral incorporating Catholic and Māori rites. Paul Millar is a lecturer in English at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand), with research interests in New Zealand and Pacific literature. He holds a BA (Hons) from Auckland University and a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington. He was a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington from 1997, before moving to the University of Canterbury in 2009. In 2001 he taught and conducted research at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa as an exchange professor and Fulbright scholar. He is a founding board member of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (www.nzetc.org), and was for some years a member of the board of the New Zealand Book Council. In 2003 he was awarded the prestigious Copyright Licensing Limited Writer's Award. He has twice judged the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.