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| | BAXTER, James K. |
 | | Baxter, James K. (1926–72), poet, dramatist, literary critic, social commentator, was born in Dunedin into an Otago farming family. |
 | | James Baxter (known by friends as ‘Jim’ or, later, ‘Hemi’) once described each of his poems as ‘part of a large subconscious corpus of personal myth, like an island above the sea, but joined underwater to other islands’, and elsewhere commented that what ‘happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology’. |
 | | Baxter’s later poetry becomes stripped of artifice and abstraction, until all that remains is a personal voice ‘almost ostentatiously matter of fact’ (Vincent O’Sullivan). |
| www.bookcouncil.org.nz /writers/baxterjk.html (2597 words) |
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