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A Branch Torn Down: poems unpublished & uncollected in the poet's lifetime

by James K. Baxter

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New Zealand poet James K. Baxter 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 A Branch Torn Down is a new selection of 189 poems unpublished and uncollected in the poet's lifetime, ranging from the precociously assured early lyrics (the earliest from the mid-1940s when the poet was still in his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'.

About the Author

James Keir Baxter was born in Dunedin on 29 June 1926 and died in Auckland on 22 October 1972. A controversial figure, he was one of New Zealand's finest, best-known, and most prolific poets.

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