thrill of the hunt

My company is looking after the publicity for a film about the life of Sam Hunt. If you're not from New Zealand, you might not know his work - he's a poet, and quite an incredible one at that. I've spent a few hours today reading his work. Here are some favourites, prefaced with an excerpt from the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature.

His distinctive appearance —tall and rangy, usually wearing drainpipe trousers (‘Foxton Straights’ he calls them) and open-chested shirts, with long hair curling wildly above a weathered face—is complemented by the familiar gravelly drawl that has made him one of New Zealand’s most recognisable figures. Virtually single-handedly, Hunt has created a broad general audience for poetry; and if it was up to the crowds who flock to hear him on stage and the school pupils he has galvanised into enjoying verse, he would be the country’s poet laureate. The value of Hunt’s approach, suggests Alan Riach, is that ‘If poetry is performance then it’s also education. If you’re reaching people who have never been touched like that before, you’re in the business of teaching.’

Part of Hunt’s appeal is also his unabashed romanticism: ‘Romantics, so they say, / don’t ever die!’ (Second ‘Song’). He is, to quote one reviewer, a ‘freewheeling ordinary bloke, a kind of Kiwi Jack Kerouac, laconic— somewhat gauche—whose poems or "roadsongs" are direct and simple, surprised by their own powerful emotion.’


And here is a poem.

Winter Solstice Song by Sam Hunt

We can believe in miracles,
easy a day like this.
For five minutes at sunrise the sun
broke through, first time in weeks,
a kiss
I took to mean arrival
and five minutes up
fucked off.
                    But it is
the year's shortest day
when anything can happen,
miracles 'not a problem'.

The sun five minutes with us
came and left with a kiss.
We believe in miracles. That, love,
is all we have.