Sitting in class late morning in 1974, on hearing a poem by the German poet & novelist Herman Hesse Peter Le Baige felt himself, in his own words, 'infused with a fermented light', and knew his future life would take him crashingly through foreign tongues and language forms and along the madly overgrown paths of poetry, wherever else it led him. Writing and performing poetry since the first session of the legendary 'Poetry Live' weekly poetry readings at the Globe Tavern in Auckland in 1980, his first two collections of poems, 'Breakers', 1979, and 'Street hung with daylit moon', 1986, are now succeeded by his 2023 collection, 'Blackbird in paradise', drawn from pieces written over the past 37 years. He remains lost in the garden still.