New Zealand only – NZ$42.50

New Zealand poet James K. Baxter [1926–72] was, in the words of his friend and editor, John Weir, ‘a complex, generous, tormented, remarkably gifted man’. A Branch Torn Down is a new selection of poems unpublished and uncollected in the poet’s lifetime, ranging from the precociously assured early lyrics (the earliest from the mid-1940s when the poet was still in his teens) to the epistolary verses addressed to friends such as Colin McCahon, Robert Lowry, Janet Frame and Denis Glover; from lively satirical ballads to the haunting final poems written in the days before his death at forty-six in 1972. Although at times priapic, misogynistic, and scatological, his poems nevertheless attest to a deep involvement in the human condition. They are a unique and memorable record of one man’s journey ‘along the stumbling, terrible, human road’.

A Branch Torn Down

November seventeen: I drag and cut

A ngaio branch torn down by last night’s gale –  

‘Hide, man, hide in the house of the snail

From the hot winds that wrangle in time’s gut!’

The prophets shout at me, ‘Your words won’t glut

The belly of Jehovah, the great whale –’

I run; but Satan with a winnowing-flail

Catches me by the knees. The gate, the gate is shut

That leads into your rose tree arbour where

You sit and give the breast to God the Word

Who laughs at you. Open the stiff hard gate,

Mother! My bones are crackling. With one prayer

You can pluck out the eyes of death and fate,

Graft back the fallen branch, green shade for the

                    flame-white bird.

                                                                 [1961]

© John Baxter 2024