MINDING HIS OWN POETRY COMPOSING BUSINESS a biography of Peter Olds

By Ōtepoti He Puna Auaha | Dunedin UNESCO City Of Literature | Posted: Tuesday Oct 28, 2025

By Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, October 2025)

Peter Olds (1944–2023) was a poet of unpretentious authenticity. His early poems recorded the struggles of the marginalised and his hazardous, substance-fueled push to the limits of experience. Overcoming his drug and alcohol addictions, he developed into a Bashoesque observer of life and his own at times difficult path through it, more often than not with humour and a Zen-inflected mindfulness of the present moment.

In Minding his own poetry composing business Olds’s friend and publisher, Roger Hickin, draws on poems, manuscripts, letters, journals, notebooks, fragments of autobiography, and interviews, to create a revealing and moving account of the restless life and preoccupations of the writer who became known as Dunedin’s unofficial poet laureate.

“Peter Olds was a storyteller who seduced with his bruised humour. This definitive biography presents a spirited innocent in wilful revolt from his Methodist upbringing. One who learned from skilful observance of the world’s often ridiculous rituals. A courteous, if fallen, witness who believed in salvation through works of mercy. Those works were his poems.”

––David Howard

“A brilliant wintry rainbow of insights.”

––John Gibb

Order your copy here: Roger Hickin Minding his own poetry composing business | Cold Hub Press