Selected Poems of James K. Baxter ed. Paul Millar (Auckland University Press/ Carcanet Press, UK, 2010) ISBN 978 1 86940 461 1 RRP $39.99

Vaughan Rapatahana

Kia ora mo tenei pukapuka o nga ruri o Hemi, Paora. Kei te tino pai tenei.

(Thank you for this book of Hemi's poems, Paul. It is damned good.)

James Keir Baxter (d.o.b 29/06, Cancer) was an archetypal ‘Outsider' - from Colin Wilson (26/06) and his seminal 1956 tome - existentially adrift here in Pig Island, marginalized by temperament, familial backgrounds, genetics, astrological parameters. A 20th century Pakeha-Maori (see my old teaching peer from Tokoroa High School, Trevor Bentley‘s excellent eponymous book here.) I'm amazed Hemi didn't ultimately sport moko - would have been next on the agenda, eh.

He was an essential part of the tradition of Aotearoa poets who are fulltime poets, who do not distil their craft peering down from fenestrated ivory towers. Sam Hunt (04/07) is another in this tradition, and Hemi's bawdy, no-holding-back song to him appears on page 183. Both battled the bottle because they had to. (I'm also amazed that I've met all of the above men and imbibed with them!)

Why, you may ask, is there another collection of Hemi's poems? Why not, eh? The man was a troubled minstrel, compelled to write self-involved myth-making poems prolifically as his means of confessional. These poems spew out his guts earthily, honestly, irreverently - at least as far as the pomposities of international and local political twits, and the hypocrisies of middle class gatekeepers of New Zealand qua Pakeha society were concerned. Which is why the latter was so enthralled by him, as much as repelled by him. Which is why he was such a staunch frontman for the dispossessed and the different. Which is why we need another astute collection such as Paul Millar has compiled here - replete with excellent and cogent notes, sensible subdivisions and some previously unpublished poems to boot. This book is our touchstone to the seeker in us all; Hemi keeps us honest, eh. Not just Kiwis either - the book has been published in Britain too. I hope it hits the Highlands and strikes a Celtic chord or two.

The poems are not all great by any means: "The collection endeavours to give a sense of the broad range of Baxter's achievement, not merely its peaks, and thus it ranges from the comic and bawdy to the political and devotional", notes Millar on page xxii, and there is a definite progression away from Modernist infatuations, toward a distinctive and culturally hybrid voice - the best poems are the last, written of course with more and more te reo Maori sprinting into the gaps. (Kia ora mo te rarangi ki te ingoa o Maori Glossary hoki, Paora - Thank you also for the glossary of Maori words, Paul. )

To me the best is the last and untitled scrawl on the wall from 1972, when Hemi knew he was going to pass, when he had at last synthesized his shards of personalities into firm identity under just that one word - Hemi; when finally he had found his wahi tika ki tenei whenua tupuhi (true place in this skinny country.) No longer "from exile into exile" in his homeland, but home ontologically at last. The gap had been filled; there was nowhere else for him to go. Here is this moteatea or song poem:

A pair of sandals, old black pants
A leather coat - I must go, my friends,
Into the dark, the cold, the first beginning
Where the ribs of the ancestors are the rafters
Of a meeting house - windows broken
And the floor white with bird dung - in there
The ghosts gather who will instruct me
And when the river fog rises
Te ra rite tonu te Atua -
The sun who is like the Lord
Will warm my bones, and his arrows
Will pierce to the centre of the shapeless clay of the mind.

Kia ora ano mo tenei pukapuka (Thank you again for this book.)

To finish, another personal note. I well remember Jim Baxter in the Kiwi Hotel in my early years at the University of Auckland. Even wrote a poem about this - see Blackmail Press # 26.

 

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