James K. Baxter (1926–72) was, as he once described Louis MacNeice, ‘the most human of poets’: a flawed, passionate, complex, haunted man, a ‘lively sinner’ who revealed himself fully and unapologetically in his poems. As editor John Weir has written in his introduction, ‘from his various quarrels with God, self, society and death emerged a body of work which reveals him to be not merely the most accessible and complete poet to have lived in New Zealand, but also one of the great English-language poets of the twentieth century.’
John Weir’s definitive selection of James K. Baxter’s best poems has been made from the more than three thousand poems that comprise his literary legacy.