The work of the former New Zealand Poet Laureate Hone Tuwhare includes some of the most sheerly enjoyable of contemporary poetry.

With a combination of conversational ease and Maori and biblical rhythms, it assimilates, among many other things, the sea, wind, sex, rain, a humming-top’s nervous balance, Miles Davis and the news that the author’s Datsun is no longer roadworthy (“I made a military/ about-turn and walked away”).

Tuwhare published his first volume of poetry aged 44, while working as a boilermaker, and scores of other books followed.

He was born in northeast New Zealand in 1922 into the Nga Puhi tribe. His mother died when he was small, and, separated from his older half-sisters, his life thereafter was itinerant — he lived in 16 homes — while his father’s odd-jobs included market-gardening. (As Tuwhare recalled, “tastes were sharper then; sandwich spread was dripping fat/ on a dry old crust/ saliva’d exaltation/ to heaven’s doorstep pure/ and juicy angels”.)

Although he first spoke Maori, his father encouraged English, including the King James Bible, but academic prowess was thwarted by a boilermaking apprenticeship in 1937 on the railways (some colour blindness was not the obstacle which precluded army service).He had communist sympathies, and met the labour organiser R. A. K. Mason, not realising at the time that he was also a notable poet. Later enlistment involved a postwar posting to Japan, after which, in Auckland, he married Jean McCormack in 1948.

Her literary enthusiasms furthered his own; these had been inspired by the Thirties writers Christopher Caudwell and Ralph Fox, and Hungary 1956 brought disillusion which, with his father’s death, prompted many poems. Encouraged by Mason, Tuwhare published No Ordinary Sun, a cry against nuclear weapons — and the first book of poetry by a Maori writer in English — in 1964. Much praised, it rapidly sold out, and has become one of the most widely read collections of poetry in New Zealand's history.

For all his reading, Tuwhare was a pub-going man who rode a motorbike. Whether in haiku-like form or long lines, his poetry demanded to be read aloud (if not always in polite company). He often did so, even appearing with the folk singer and political activist Pete Seeger. A continuing day-job at a hydroelectric project on the Rangitaiki River frayed a marriage already strained. Too generous when in funds, he lived by his pen, a friend of such people as the poets Bill Manhire and J. K. Baxter (whose burial prompted a fine poem).

In demand around the world, he won various grants and awards as volumes followed. In 1969 and 1974 he was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, and in the Seventies he also became involved in Maori cultural and political initiatives. He helped to organise the first Maori Writers and Artists Conference in 1973 and participated in the Maori Land March of 1975, which inspired a full-length play, In the Wilderness Without a Hat (performed in 1985 and published in 1991). He deepened his knowledge of Maori history and language as Hocken Library Research Fellow at the University of Otago in 1983.

In 1991 he was Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland and the following year he was awarded a Scholarship in Letters by the QEII Arts Council of New Zealand. He finally settled in a small, remote building at Kaka Point, on the ocean south of Dunedin, and later poems reflected the landscape of the Catlins area. (“I have to remind myself, the Sea, at its most/ expansive, is parent also to a canker/ or rancor it can barely conceal.”)

In the 1990s Tuwhare published the collections Short Back and Sideways: Poems & Prose (1992), Deep River Talk (1993), and Shape-Shifter (1997). After two years as Poet Laureate, from 1999 to 2001, he published Piggy Back Moon (2002), which contains moving poems in the memory of his friend Shirley (or Kereihi) Grace, and whose homely details include the “Frigidaire/ which murmurs judgementally — when its roomy belly is not/ overburdened with nutrious/ tucker. . . saucerware/ left-overs, cooked food of a variety/ and color-freeze dried — that cannot be/ easily identified”.

Tuwhare published his last collection of poems in 2005. He is survived by three sons.

Hone Tuwhare, poet, was born on October 21, 1922. He died on January 16, 2008, aged 85