Author(s): Peter Olds

New Zealand Poetry

Peter Olds was born in Christchurch in 1944. His father was a Methodist minister. He was educated at Seddon Memorial College in Auckland and after leaving school trained as a window dresser . Following a spell in a detention centre in the mid-60s he hitch-hiked south to Dunedin where he lived for a time with some bohemians in a communal flat above a wineshop in the university area and began to write. After a period in Cherry Farm Hospital he followed the poet James K. Baxter to Jerusalem on the Wanganui River where Baxter had created a rural crash-pad for runaways, delinquents and hippies. Returning to Dunedin in the early 70s he published, over the next decade, several collections of poetry with Caveman Press. He was Robert Bums Fellow in 1978. Music Therapy covers two periods of the poet's life: Seacliff, where he lived in a hut in the 80s, and Dunedin in the 90s, after a breakdown, which resulted in the discovery of group therapy and 'the people who make pictures with runny paint. Interweaving are the memories of past psychiatric experiences. And, intermittently, there is Omokoroa 'where my parents live, where I travel once a year to breath the wispy feijoa-scented air'. His poetry appears in the anthology, Big Smoke New Zealand Poems 1960- 1975 (AUP).

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