JAMES K. BAXTER POEMS
Selected & introduced by Sam Hunt
Auckland University Press - $29.99

Dear Sam, this day as I came down
The steps that take me into town,
Rehearsing in my head these rhymes
That hold a mirror to the times,
A perfect omen crossed my track,
A garbage-eater, wild and black,
Pugnacious, paranoid and sly,
A tomcat with a boxer’s eye
Dripping a gum of yellow pus,
I thought that he resembled us

— James K. Baxter, from ‘Letter to Sam Hunt’

In this book poet and performer Sam Hunt introduces his fifty favourite poems by James K. Baxter – verses he has lived with, road-tested and recited around New Zealand for more than forty years.
Hunt first became aware of Baxter’s work as a school boy. Aged fourteen, he was strapped after reciting ‘Evidence at the Witch Trials’ in an English lesson (one of the final straws in a series of events resulting in his expulsion from high school). Baxter later became a friend and mentor who greatly influenced the unconventional poetic course Hunt’s life would take.

Selected from poems that have engraved themselves on Sam Hunt’s brain, heart and tongue, James K. Baxter: Poems is a quirky, refreshing and original look at one of New Zealand’s finest poets.

Sam Hunt was born in 1946 in Castor Bay, Auckland. His most recent book is Doubtless: New & Selected Poems (2008). He lives on the Kaipara Harbour.
James K. Baxter was born in Dunedin in 1926 and died in Auckland in 1972. One of New Zealand’s greatest poets, he was also a dramatist, literary critic and social commentator.

One of the features of this new collection is Sam Hunt’s thoughtful and entertaining ten page introduction. He and his publishers have given me permission to reproduce the first para from that introduction:

Over the years when I’ve taken James K. Baxter poems to Different venues – pubs, theatres, festivals, schools and the like – people will often say after a show: ‘Where can I get hold of that poem of Baxter’s you did tonight?’ In the past I’ve had to say, ‘Oh, well, it’s available in his Collected Poems,’ which is a pretty big book for the sort of people who may not have ever been to a poetry show before. I’ve thought since the early 1980s that it would be just right to get a collection together of about 50 of what Jim Baxter used to refer to as his top-drawer poems. When Baxter lived in Ngaio in earlier days, domestic days, he had drawers where he’d put things – and a good poem would be a top-drawer poem. For me, as editor, as chooser, the poems in this book are the high-octane, road-warranted, road-tested poems.

Thanks Sam, you have done a grand job with this attractive hardback book.

As I read your introduction and about your connection with Jim Baxter I was taken back to 1980 when I had the great joy of publishing your Sam Hunt- Collected Poems at Penguin Books, the paperback with the wonderful Phil Fogle photograph of you in your leopard skin shirt leaning on the back of your old Valiant!

Then 5 years later we published Sam Hunt – Approaches to Paremata with the Bruce Connew cover pic of you rowing your wooden dinghy on Paremata harbour. Those were of course the days of your famous pub poetry readings and I recall you selling as many as 50 copies after such a reading at the much lamented Gluepot Tavern in Ponsonby.

Footnote:
This new book is a little treasure which I shall add to my other small hardback Baxter gem, The Essential Baxter – Selected by John Weir – Oxford (1993). Long out of print of course but even sadder is the fact that OUP are no longer active publishers of NZ titles having long since folded their teent and moved out to Melbourne and we hear little of them now.

They were once very significant NZ publishers with editors of the calibre of Bridget Williams and Wendy Harrex producing a steady stream of important New Zealand work.

Ah well , at least those two impressive publishers are both still busy publishing excellent books, Bridget with her eponymous Wellington-based outfit and Wendy at Otago University Press.

Footnote 2.

Sam Hunt Published works
"From Bottle Creek: Selected Poems 1967–69" (1969)
"Bracken Country" (1971)
"From Bottle Creek" (1972)
"Roadsong Paekakariki" (1973)
"South Into Winter: Poems and Roadsongs" (1973)
"Time To Ride" (1975)
"Drunkard’s Garden" (1977)
"Poems for the Eighties : New Poems" (1979)
"Collected Poems 1963–1980" (1980)
"Running Scared" (1982)
"Approaches To Paremata" (1985)
"Selected Poems" (1987)
"Making Tracks" (1991)
"Naming the Gods" (1992)
"Down the Backbone" (1995)
"Roaring Forties" (1997)
"Doubtless: new and selected poems" (2008)