Minding his own poetry composing business

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, manuscripts, letters, journals, notebooks, fragments of autobiography, and interviews, to create a revealing and moving account of the restless life and preoccupations of Dunedin's unofficial poet laureate.