Peter Olds
Peter Olds was born in Christchurch in 1944. His books include Music Therapy (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop 2001), It Was a Tuesday Morning: Selected Poems 1972 - 2001 (Hazard Press 2004), Poetry Reading at Kaka Point (Steele Roberts 2006), and Under the Dundas Street Bridge (Steele Roberts 2012). He was Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University 1978, and received the Janet Frame Literary Award in 2005. He lives in Dunedin.
Olds comments: ‘I spent the first five years of my life on a small farm in the Ashley area, Canterbury. My father was a bee-keeper. The poem describes an early memory of accompanying my father on one of his trips to the paddock where the hives were kept. There were raider bees in the air at the time. A hot nor-wester blew. I was instructed to stay in the car while my father (protected) went off, out of sight, to check the hives. He was away for a long time. I climbed down from the car, began to make my way across the paddock and was attacked by angry, black bees.’
