James K. Baxter (1926-1972) is one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable poets, yet he has been too little regarded of outside his native New Zealand. In this innovative selection, Paul Millar, the expert on Baxter, gathers his most powerful and celebrated poems - political, lyrical and spiritual - with some of his more unexpected writings, including previously unpublished work. The book is in four sections, representing the stages from Baxter's early published work to his last vivid, inspiring and notorious years as a guru of the counter-culture. Each section has a biographical introduction. Notes, a glossary covering words and references unique to New Zealand, and a full bibliography, complete this essential celebration of Baxter's poetry.

James K. Baxter was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1926. He attended Quaker schools in New Zealand and England, and in 1944 enrolled at the University of Otago. He published his first collection of poetry, Beyond the Palisades, in the same year. He abandoned his course a year later, struggling with alcoholism, and from 1945 to 1947 took a series of manual jobs. He was baptised as an Anglican and, in 1953 he published his third major collection and began to study at Victoria University in Wellington. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1954, and was greatly influenced by its principles; he was also increasingly drawn to Roman Catholicism, and in 1958 was received into the Church. His collection In Fires of No Return (1958), brought him international recognition. A UNESCO Fellowship enabled him to travel to Japan and India, and led to an increasingly critical attitude to New Zealand society, responses he explored in the poetry and plays of the 1960s. In 1966 Baxter was awarded a Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. He wrote poetry, plays and works of criticism prolifically, but in 1968 he left his university post, and his family, to establish a drop-in centre for drug addicts in Auckland. A year later, he began to create a commune at Jerusalem, a former mission station. Baxter died in Auckland in 1972 and was buried at Jerusalem in a funeral incorporating Catholic and Mori rites. Paul Millar is a lecturer in English at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand), with research interests in New Zealand and Pacific literature. He holds a BA (Hons) from Auckland University and a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington. He was a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington from 1997, before moving to the University of Canterbury in 2009. In 2001 he taught and conducted research at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa as an exchange professor and Fulbright scholar. He is a founding board member of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre and was for some years a member of the board of the New Zealand Book Council. In 2003 he was awarded the prestigious Copyright Licensing Limited Writer's Award. He has twice judged the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.