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By 1972, when James K Baxter died aged 46, his colourful life and distinctive poetry had captured the imagination of New Zealanders as no literary figure before him. In this new, full, generous and authoritative selection of James K Baxter's verse for general readers and students, New Zealand's leading Baxter scholar Paul Millar endeavours to give a sense of the broad range of Baxter's achievement, not merely its peaks, and thus the book ranges from the comic and bawdy to the political and devotional. There is currently no other wide-ranging but compact selection of Baxter's poems in print and the popularity of Sam Hunt's James K Baxter Poems (AUP, 2009) has shown there is still enormous interest in Baxter's work. Presented as a hand-sized, affordable paperback, Selected Poems of James K Baxter contains the full texts of the major sequences 'Pig Island Letters' and the 'Jerusalem Sonnets', a representative range of poems from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and the Jerusalem period, and key unpublished poems seen here in book form for the first time. Arranged in four parts, the book also includes an insightful introduction by Paul Millar, short prefaces to the four parts, useful notes, glossary, index and a small selection of Baxter photographs.