What can I say about Baxter? He was raised in a far beach suburb of Dunedin, went to Otago University where he discovered alcoholism, became sober, became Catholic, and is now relentlessly unfashionable.
And I consider him the best NZ poet.
A pair of sandals, old black pants
And leather coat – I must go, my friends,
Into the dark, the cold, the first beginning
Where the ribs of the ancestor 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.