Sam Hunt ’al home’ in S.I.

Press, 10 April 1979, Page 1

Sam Hunt ’al home’ in S.I.

NANCY CAWLEY

By T

The ebullient New Zealand poet Sam Hunt is in Christchurch for a few days at the invitation of the Tigers’ Rugby Club. On Saturday evening, he helped to celebrate the opening of the club rugby season by addressing members on ’’the Poet as Rugby Player.”

Mr Hunt was “a rugby player of note” according to a Tigers’ Club member, ‘‘and pool player,” said the poet.

Sam Hunt said he was “spiritually at home” in the South Island. His next visit will be in three months when he joins three other poets: Alistair Campbell, Jan Kemp, and Hone Tuwhare, in a tour sponsored by the Students’ Arts Council.

“The council organised our 1975 tour, and were thoroughly efficient. This time they have come up with $30,000. That will take us all over New Zealand at about $4OO each a week,” he said. The itinerant poets are due in Christchurch early

in July, and will perform in schools and other educational institutions during the day, and give concerts at night. The road manager for the tour, says Mr Hunt, will be his “father-out-law.”

Mr Hunt was looking forward to poetry-reading recitals in Melbourne and Sydney later in the year. On previous trips he had found Australian audiences most receptive. "They are open to so much,” he said. His next published work will be a collection of poems written since '1965, called “Sailor’s Morning,” which will be published at the end of the year. There would be no overall theme during the New Zealand tour, but Mr Hunt felt that "themes may emerge. We will just be on the road with, hopefully, a few good poems.” One of the poems is likely to be his latest, called “Death’s Dance,” which is about his old Death’s Comer homestead, at Pauatahanui “on the other side of Paremata Inlet,” where Sam lives with his lady, Kristin, and their son, Tom, aged two years and a half.

Grandma Weldon at the local store remembers well — a girl of four — a party here; so many guests that when they all joined hands to dance they circled out the main front door around the wide veranda once in through the living-room then out and down again the corridor — “Remember that without a doubt!” says Grandma Weldon at the store.