THE LIFE OF JAMES K. BAXTER

By Frank McKay

Published by Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1990. – this edition published 1992

Card cover, 320 pages, black and white photos, maps

Very good condition

James K. Baxter (1926-1972) one of the major English language poets of this century, was a man of contradictions. This biography presents his many faces: the gloomy adolescent, brooding on sex and death, the roaring boy, the family man, 'head between thumbs at mass', the long-haired founder of a community for the casualties of society, and all the stages in between. A brilliant talker, a deeply self-aware man who contrived a series of complex masks, a man as equally at home with the vulgar or profane as the profound or sublime, James K. Baxter was larger than life...

CONTENTS: Preface I Acknowledgements I The Ancestral Face II The Colour of Identity 111 Kings High School 1940-1943 IV The Making of a Poet V First Book, First Love vi A Seeding Time vu The Young Married Man VIII The Path to Rome IX Baxter in Asia X Pig Island Letters XI City of Our Youth XII The Junkies and the Fuzz X11 TheTwo Jerusalems XIV The Arms of Hine-nui-to-po Glossary Chronology Select Bibliography Notes lndex