James H. Baxter Jr., 79, a medical director in the U.S. Public Health Service who retired from the National Institutes of Health as a research scientist, died of a heart ailment May 5 at his home in Bethesda. Dr. Baxter was born in...

Paul Millar, ed. & intro. Wellington, New Zealand. Victoria University Press (Paul & Company, distr.) 2002. 567 pages + 8 plates. $32.95. ISBN 0-86473-400-X THE BEST-KNOWN of New Zealand poets, James Keir Baxter, died in 1972 at the age of forty-six. His...

More clearly than with many artists, Baxter's life and work are interdependent. From the first a controversial and complex figure, he apparently contained within himself profound contradictions. Deeply moral, he flaunted the conventions of his society over and over again…. Finding much in New Zealand life to attack, he yet realized that his true personal center was inseparable from his own country. (p. 19)

When James K. Baxter, who died far too young in New Zealand last year, began his last book [Runes] with a section entitled 'after Catullus', it was anything but an academic exercise. One of the sources of Baxter's power was that when he drew on myth or literature, whether classical or Biblical, it no longer seemed an outside allusion, but became a natural source of reference, immediate and intimate…. What he shared with Catullus, and with Rimbaud, whom he translated brilliantly, ...

[James K. Baxter] is, indeed, the central figure in the contemporary scene, mediator among writers of different ages and outlooks, focus of highest hopes for the future. Not that he belongs in the category of the 'promising'; while still in his early thirties, his past as poet and critic is already substantial…. Familiar themes—nature's menace, the spiritual strength of the Polynesians, the precariousness of European occupation—reappeared [in Beyond the Palisade (19...

Themes of Baxter's Poetry, including references to his life and suggesting links between them.