Publication date 30 October 2025

Minding his own poetry composing business

A biography of Peter Olds

by Roger Hickin

ISBN: 978-0-473-75979-7

Softcover, 312 pp, 210 x 148 mm

Peter Olds (1944–2023) was a poet of unpretentious authenticity. His early poems recorded the struggles of the marginalised and his hazardous, substance- fueled push to the limits of experience. Overcoming his drug and alcohol addictions, he developed into a Bashoesque observer of life and his own at times difficult path through it, more often than not with humour and a Zen-inflected mindfulness of the present moment.

In Minding his own poetry composing business Olds’s friend and publisher, Roger Hickin, draws on poems, letters, journals, notebooks, manuscripts, fragments of memoir, and interviews, to create a revealing and moving account of the life and preoccupations of a restless soul who became the unofficial poet laureate of Dunedin.

‘A brilliant wintry rainbow of insights.’ ––John Gibb

'Peter Olds was a storyteller who seduced with his bruised humour. This definitive biography presents a spirited innocent in wilful revolt from his Methodist upbringing. One who learned from skilful observance of the world’s often ridiculous rituals. A courteous, if fallen, witness who believed in salvation through works of mercy. Those works were his poems.' ––David Howard 

One afternoon he was sitting in the Hob Nob, a popular subterranean coffee bar in Dunedin’s Princes Street, smoking a Turkish cigarette, writing his ‘own genius thoughts’ in his notebook:

There was a girl at one of the tables . . . Friendly. Saw me

with the notebook. Asked if I was a writer––‘Sort of,’ I said.

‘I’m trying to write songs,’ I added hopefully. ‘Oh,’ she smiled,

‘I write poems.’ She was my first poet.

The girl was Hilary Baxter, the seventeen-year-old daughter of poet James K. Baxter. She suggested Peter show his ‘songs’ to her father. Back in his home town with his family, having been awarded the 1966 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, Baxter was Peter’s second  poet: ‘not one that lived in a country house in England (as I thought all poets did)––but right here in North Dunedin.’ Soon they were roaming the streets together, Baxter, in his usual way, doing most of the talking, as Peter squirmed ‘with terrible inferiority’:

Jim was my teacher and friend––he encouraged me out of sight. I was accepted into his family group, I ate in his home and smoked Calypsos non-stop, mentally thanking Jim’s wife, Jacquie, for putting up with my bum shadowy appearance. And when I rose to leave to head back to my shack in south Dunedin, there would always be the ‘come again’ offer. Come again I did . . .

Nevertheless, his feelings about Baxter were ambivalent. ‘I think he paid more attention to me than I did to him. He affected me terribly,’ Peter demurred a few years after Baxter’s death, when asked about their closeness.19 He found it ‘a bit much’ when on one of their walks the poet told him he loved him. He decided Baxter must be either homosexual or mad, and ‘in the end, to be on the safe side, concluded he was mad’. Nor did he appreciate Baxter’s persistent attempts to convert him to Roman Catholicism, ‘while driving a car so badly I often wondered how in hell he got a licence’.

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