Time and space in Hiruharama: James K. Baxter's vivid culture of images

The New Zealand poet, James K Baxter (1926-1972) was a most professional poet who maintained meticulous records and fair copies. He sought and gained social recognition and international publication. Towards the end of his life he turned away from his professional artistic way of life and literally walked into the wilderness. Where he ended up was a small Maori community at Hiruharama (a transliteration of Jerusalem). Here Baxter attempted a spiritual, social and poetic experiment: he attempted to make his life vivid. The first record of this experiment is to be found in the sequence, Jerusalem Sonnets, consisting of thirty-nine meditative and diary-like poems. The poet announces in the final sonnet, thirty-nine, that he had “hoped for fifty sonnets”, such was his formal temperament even in the mode of mystic voyager. In the Jerusalem Sonnets, Baxter seeks to make explicit (vivid) the spiritual dimension of culture in the everyday life he set out to follow.