Out of the Jaws of Wesley: 1944–1972 a record

Out of the Jaws of Wesley––a Peter Olds miscellany which includes much previously unpublished material––records in word and image his sometimes tortured progress from Methodist boy to bodgie to poet. Prose sketches and poems look back to his childhood in the 1940s and 50s in mid-Canterbury, South Otago and Dunedin, and to his late teens as an Auckland V8 boy. By the mid-1960s he has discovered the Beat writers and over the next few years forms a close bond with poet James K. Baxter. Letters to his parents are frank about his mental health and addictions, and speak of his growing sense of vocation as a poet: “Even tho I know I’m not going to make money, I find I like more and more the tools I am working with . . . being (I think) a socialist, wishing in my own way to point the finger and make what would otherwise be buried known to the public.” His reputation increases as he is published in university student journals, prints his own broadsheets, edits and illustrates a literary page in the Otago University student paper Critic, and designs book covers for Trevor Reeves’ Caveman Press––which publishes several pamphlets of his poems. The record ends in 1972, the year Baxter dies, and his first full poetry collection––Lady Moss Revived––appears.