quality of poems that is most important to him. After a publishing gap of nearly a decade, Hunt has published in most years since 2007. Hunt's book sales far exceed most New Zealand poets. In April 2009, New Zealand musician David Kilgour, of cult band The Clean, released an album on which poems by Hunt were reinvented as song lyrics. In 2014, Hunt and Kilgour reunited with The Heavy 8s, to create a second album. Unlike the first album, where Kilgour was lead vocalist, Hunt is the lead vocalist on "The 9th". The album was released in May 2015 to critical acclaim and was supported by gigs in Queenstown, Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland following its release. Iconic status Hunt's distinctive appearance – tall and thin, usually wearing long, tight, trousers ("Foxton straights" he has called them) with vests and open-chested shirts, with long hair curling wildly above a well-worn face – is complemented by the familiar gravelly drawl, the rhythmic, sometimes staccato and sometimes incantatory quality of his recitation (often tapping his fingers or flicking a hand to emphasise the poetic beat) and the execution of occasional small dance-like steps of concentration. These have all made him one of New Zealand's most recognisable figures. Once, almost as well-known was his long-time travelling companion, the dog Minstrel. "A bard in the truest sense of the itinerant minstrel, Hunt's turangawaewae [i.e. 'one's own turf', literally: 'a place to stand'] is the public bar. Touring the pubs with bands of musos and poets, he is himself one of the national icons". Hunt is also a familiar figure in New Zealand figurative art, notably in paintings by Robin White, such as in Sam Hunt at the Portobello Pub, painted in 1978. In 2012, the artist Dick Frizzell completed a series of paintings of Sam Hunt poems. At the opening of the exhibition of those paintings on 7 February 2012, Frizzell said that he and Hunt had, in their respective paintings and poems, committed the ultimate "sin", the "sin of being understood". Honours and awards Hunt was awarded a Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1975, and spent 1976 in Dunedin. In the 1985 Queen's Birthday Honours, he was awarded the Queen's Service Medal for community service, and in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to poetry. In 2012