New Zealand poet James K. Baxter [1926–72] was, in the words of his friend and editor, John Weir, ‘a complex, generous, tormented, remarkably gifted man’. A Branch Torn Down is a new selection of poems unpublished and uncollected in the poet’s lifetime, ranging from the precociously assured early lyrics (the earliest from the mid-1940s when the poet was still in his teens) to the epistolary verses addressed to friends such as Colin McCahon, Robert Lowry, Janet Frame and Denis Glover; from lively satirical ballads to the haunting final poems written in the days before his death at forty-six in 1972. Although at times priapic, misogynistic, and scatological, his poems nevertheless attest to a deep involvement in the human condition. They are a unique and memorable record of one man’s journey ‘along the stumbling, terrible, human road’.