above) are set in Porirua nearby. In the 1980s Hunt with Jack Lasenby and Ian Riggir (who both lived in Paremata) published poems on an 1886 upright press obtained from the Government Printing Office. In 1997 Hunt moved to Waiheke Island near Auckland. He later moved to Kaipara in Northland with his younger son, Alf. Hunt has been a central figure in New Zealand literature since the publication of his first mature work From Bottle Creek: Selected Poems 1967–69 in 1969, published when the poet was aged just 23. He was a prolific writer in the 1970s–1990s. By focusing on the public performance aspects of poetry, Hunt was the "young poet" who most successfully reached a wider audience. Hunt pointed out how his poetry showed up the intellectuality of his contemporaries and their inclination to see popular culture as input rather than output. Much of Hunt's output is in a style similar to those of Denis Glover, Alistair Campbell, and James K. Baxter. These poets were personal friends as well as influences on Hunt. Baxter was particularly important to, and wrote many poems for, Hunt. In one of the most important of these poems, Letter to Sam Hunt, Baxter provided advice to the young Hunt. Hunt frequently delivers Baxter poems in his performances and has claimed to have committed 200 of them to memory. Many of Hunt's performance tours have been undertaken with another poet and "fellow exuberant", Gary McCormick. Hunt has a high regard for other twentieth-century English language poets such as William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas (Hunt particularly loves Thomas' poem, In my Craft or Sullen Art, which he sees as speaking to his own mission as a poet; he has said that he sometimes gives his occupation (to Customs Officers and such) as "sullen artist"). He also loves foreign language poets such as the Italian, Salvatore Quasimodo, and the Hungarian poet Jozsef Attila (Hunt often recites Attila's poem A Hetedik or The Seventh with which he is familiar in both English and Hungarian (having heard it as a child often delivered by a Hungarian friend of his family)). Hunt also admires the work of Bob Dylan amongst many other poets. As well as his own poems, Hunt, in his performances, recites poems by all these poets, whether famous, obscure or anonymous (from sometimes unlikely sources, for example The War Cry). It is the