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The Glass Guitar
At first you don’t notice it
among the furnishings & potplants
half hidden in a darker part of the room:
the glass guitar
its neck bent
strings curled round its head
almost shameful in an otherwise
cheerful room,
people drinking beer
watching TV
taking little notice of arrivals and departures
clinking glass on teeth for sound effect
and in the hallway a small stereo tapping quietly
by a bedroom door,
no one paying attention to the glass guitar.
At first you don’t notice the urge
to smash glass:
the coffee table wet with slippery light
the floor crowded with spinning bottles
foetuses anlike mad.d clown-masks
walls sucked in like toothless heads . . .
Flopped in a beanchair
the overhead lights switched off
a candlestub spluttering for effect,
it suddenly hits you
like something you can’t find words for
and you reach for the guitar
and start strumming and singing
like mad.
© The estate of Peter Olds 2023
Publication date: 6 November 2023
Peter Olds
The Glass Guitar
ISBN: 978-0-473-69137-0
Softcover, 72 pp, 210 x 148 mm
Cold Hub Press ~ Peter Olds
The Glass Guitar comprises thirty-three previously uncollected and mostly unpublished poems in which Peter Olds reflects frankly on some of his characteristic preoccupations: the imperfections of life and art; his travels in space and time; his sometimes challenging relationship with his mentor, friend, and fellow poet James K. Baxter. In his introduction John Gibb describes Olds as “a navigator of contrasting and sometimes contradictory worlds, a kind of battered Zen ambassador of humanity, an at times irreverent pilgrim making his way through life”, and argues the case for Olds as a multi-disiplinary artist, as evidenced in Out of the Jaws of Wesley, a miscellany of Olds’ poems, prose, book cover designs and art work, (Cold Hub Press, 2022).
Peter Olds was a Robert Burns fellow at the University of Otago in 1978, and in 2005 was the first recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry. He died in Dunedin at the age of 79 on 31 August 2023.
Cover image: Kathryn Madill, untitled collage, 2011,
hand-coloured by Peter Olds