David Eggleton
Selected Poems of James K. Baxter, edited by Paul Millar (Auckland University Press, 2010) $39.99, 297 pp.
Selected Poems of James K. Baxter, edited by Paul Millar (Auckland University Press, 2010) $39.99, 297 pp.
James K. Baxter: Poems, selected and introduced by Sam Hunt (Auckland University Press, 2009), $29.99, 105 pp.
The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem Commune, by John Newton (Victoria University Press, 2009) $40.00, 224 pp.
On the cover of Paul Millar’s Selected Poems of James K. Baxter, the eponymous poet has been photographed as a man in a straitjacket: symbolically swaddled, restrained and repressed in his back-to-front overcoat — a rebel with a cause. From his beginnings as the infant prodigy, absorbing the recited lines of Robert Burns’s ‘Tam O’ Shanter’[i] on his father’s knee, to the encyclopaedic poetry graphomania of his youth, to the soliloquising hairy phenomenon of the Jerusalem commune years, James K. Baxter (1926–1972) was always one who refused to pull his head in.
Born into a family of Scottish Calvinist dissenters settled in the Otago hinterland, and raised within a tradition of pacifism, socialism, and free-ranging intellectual enquiry, it was perhaps inevitable that the role of non-conformist — as gadfly, guru, prophet and martyr, of sorts — was one that the precocious Baxter would play to the hilt. (‘Better to err with Burns and Byron than fall in line with Brasch’, the teenage Baxter wrote to his pen-pal Noel Ginn.[ii]) But grandstanding and swashbuckling were merely aspects of Baxter’s contrarian methodology, and in John Newton’s work of social history — built on a diligent gathering of oral histories — Newton explores, and to an extent explains, how the poet’s adolescent alienation, suburban outrages and establishment antagonisms enabled him to move towards a pioneering radical activism that in turn helped to herald a new climate, a new populist mood, a sense of revolution.
