When some cheese-headed ladder-climber reads A poem of mine from the rostrum, Don’t listen. That girl in her jersey and beads, Second row from the front, has the original nostrum I blundered through nine hundred parties and ninety-eight pubs In search of. The words are a totem Erected long after for scholars and yobs Who’d make, if they could, a bicycle-seat of my scrotum. (‘To Any Young Man who Hears my Verses Read in a Lecture Room’) The person James Baxter has to thank for saving this gem from oblivion is a Wellington lecturer. Such a paradox would not have been lost on a poet who spent his life at war with the powers of this world and who made his own rough peace with them, when he could. Baxter wrote much scurrilous verse about universities while relying on their patronage. He bent Catholic dogma inside out while running a commune with church blessing. ...