Sam hunt biography father scything

Sam Hunt is a rare commodity in New Zealand: a ham actor playing to the gallery and willing to go out on a limb; he’s also a highly-effective poet, wise about his craft, while being a national icon.

Beloved New Zealand poet Sam Hunt shares with Nicola Russell his memories of his father, Percival Hunt, a sharply dressed, quick-witted barrister.

Born in Auckland in , Hunt was introduced to poetry at an early age; both of his parents were interested in the arts and loved to recite poems.

My father was sixty when I was born, Twice my mother's age.

His father, a barrister, was 'sixty when I was born, / twice my mother's age when I wanted him most He was somewhere else' ('My Father Scything').

The liquor is talking and sometimes the talk is brilliant.

Partly this fame tends to obscure the achievement of his verse, partly it glamorises it. On stage, Celebrity Sam hunches over like a mean old blues singer, a compendium of poems in his head. He’s the lead performer in his own narratives.

It’s a rare individual who can get us to accept his self-mythologising — most don’t manage it.

Born in Auckland in 1946, Hunt was introduced to poetry at an early age; both of his parents were interested in the arts and loved to recite poems.

At his Catholic high school, Hunt was unconventional and anti-authoritarian; and eventually he was asked to leave. In the 1960s, Alistair Campbell’s slim collection of poems Wild Honey, and Bob Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited were the poet’s twin beacons in