New Zealand's best known poet has retired. Sort of. Philip Matthews asks Sam Hunt why he is off the road.

To live outside the law, you must be honest, as the poet said. Not this poet, a different one. But the line hangs over the afternoon.

First, lunch. If you are ever on Highway 12 in Northland around midday, we can recommend the Thirsty Tui gastropub in Paparoa. The dining room walls are painted pale green. Trucks rush by on the highway. Poet Sam Hunt orders a bottle of Chilean red and, later, a second.

He explains the menu in the same slightly fussy but endearing way that he explained the risks of his muddy rural driveway when he briefed the journalist over the phone. He pours the wine and clinks both the top of the glass and the base.

"Alf, my youngest son, and I used to call that the Hunt boys' toast."

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For a long time, Hunt was a solo dad up here in the remote north but Alf, who is 20, is living down in Auckland now and learning to be a builder. His oldest son, Tom, 42, lives in Wellington and is father of the poet's grandson, Loki, aged 7. Loki as in the Norse god of mischief.

"He thinks my name's Grandsam."

Doting Grandsam produces a letter and photo. Here is young Loki running at some school sports event.

"I was telling him on the phone about Paavo Nurmi​, the Olympic runner from the 1920s. He didn't know who Paavo Nurmi was but he does now.

"I wish I saw more of them but since I retired two years ago... When I say retired, not retired from the poems. The poems haven't retired from me either, thank God."

What Hunt means by "retired" is that the New Zealand poet famous for long tours and repeat visits to schools and pubs – the nomadic bard who seemed more comfortable on the road than at home – is off the road. He is parked up. He is stationary.

JASON DORDAY/STUFF Poet Sam Hunt in the kitchen with his Bob Dylan tea towel.

He is 72 now. Did he retire at a symbolic 70?

"It wasn't meant that way," he explains. "But it was three score years and 10. I just stopped wanting to do things. I didn't want to go to wherever I was meant to be going. I didn't want another airport, I didn't want to be greeted by another stranger. The only part I miss is doing the shows. But I don't miss the hotels, the airports, the car parks. I did 50 years of it, with breaks. When Tom was born, I took a couple of years off the road."

His friends tell him he has become a recluse.

"It hadn't occurred to me but I thought about it, and it's right. I go to the store most days but often days will go by and I haven't talked to anyone. I don't think it's a bad thing. I've always believed the process of making up poems is listening. If I don't have silence, I can't hear things. You get distracted by bulls....

"So my life has changed. The last two years... I hadn't given it any thought. I robbed a few banks at the appropriate time and that was handy."

He jokes so often about robbing banks that you begin to wonder if he really is joking. The police should look into any unsolved bank robberies in the north.

"I've got to remember to put the balaclava on the right way. Got to make sure it covers my face."

His style is the poet as outlaw, vagabond and other such words. Elegantly wasted is what they used to say of Keith Richards. He is still good company – eccentric, talkative, charismatic – even in his retirement, even as a recluse.

"Not Carthusian style, but Cistercian style," he asserts.

JASON DORDAY/STUFF Sam Hunt at home. His friends tell him he has become a recluse.

GUNS AND VOICES

The official reason for meeting Hunt is that there is a new book of poems, Coming To It. This is a selected poems, or a greatest hits, plus about 30 new ones. It replaces the previous selected, 2012's Knucklebones, which sold out its print run of 3000. His last book of new poems, Salt River Songs, sold just under 3000.

These are good numbers for New Zealand poetry, which is usually in a 250-500 ballpark, but he is an accessible poet and there is a lot of residual love for him. Maybe it was all those public bars and school visits.

"I can honestly say that with the exception of two colleges, I always left feeling the world was not in too bad a place. There were just a couple of high schools that had the air of death about them. I won't say who they were.

"It was proving the old theory that poems are there to be told. You don't necessarily have to see the score. A book of poems is really a book of scores. They're not the poems, they're copies of the poems. I still feel strongly that way. I grew up hearing poems and I'm still listening."

But he is no longer doing shows? Hang on, not so fast. He explains by way of his poem My father's waistcoats, which concludes with the line "I carry a gun in my head".

"I'm doing shows, don't you worry. I'm working just as hard, I just don't have to be there at a particular time."

Then he says: "No, I'm making light of it." He has a room downstairs which he doesn't call his studio. He has set lists written out and he runs through the material, setting himself tasks – say, an hour of Yeats performed from memory. This week he has been learning Auden's The Shield of Achilles: "It has taken me 72 years to realise what a great poem that is, I'm ashamed to say."

Can you picture Hunt in the downstairs room, declaiming Yeats and Auden to no one? "Pathetic, in a way," he admits. "I remind myself of a character out of Dylan Thomas."

From the hundreds – no, thousands – of poems and quotes stored in his head he produces Thomas' Quite Early One Morning. There are sad lines about the old contralto Clara Tawe Jenkins, who sits at the window and sings to the sea, for the sea does not notice that her voice has gone.

"F...ing beautiful. I've loved those lines since I was probably 8 or 9 years old. I forget when we first got the Dylan Thomas record."

JASON DORDAY/STUFF Sam Hunt: 'I'm working just as hard, I just don't have to be there at a particular time.'

He recalled in his book Backroads that he was raised around poems told by his father, mother and grandfather. Milford on Auckland's North Shore was "a garden of Eden to grow up in". In his teens, he wagged from St Peter's College and took off alone to Rangitoto or Long Bay, being a poet, writing poems.

Teenage longing and the impulse towards difference: a poet was a calling, a lifestyle. There was that freedom. James K Baxter was a model of the poet as outsider. It was the 1960s and one of Hunt's key poems, Rainbows, and a promise of snow, says: "Sixteen and just left school/I dumped my books and hiked/four hundred miles south;/hitched-up where I liked."

An appearance on the TV arts show Kaleidoscope in the early 1970s made him famous overnight and there is a way in which his whole life since has been a realisation of the project he conceived in his teens. The poems reinforce the legend, the anecdotes reflect the poems. There is a sense of never being off duty, but there is also – and this surprises people – that tendency towards solitude.

"I find it very difficult to live full-time with a woman," he explained in Backroads. "That's no reflection on the woman involved – it just doesn't suit me."

Anyway, that Dylan Thomas record. There was something special about hearing the speech of the poet. The Sylvia Plath​ recordings, too, where all the darkness of Daddy and Lady Lazarus was in her voice.

That reminds him of a story. Way back in 1967, he had a temporary teaching job at Mana College, Porirua. He had just discovered Plath's book Ariel and was mad about it. He would read it to the kids.

Years passed. He was doing a gig somewhere and a policewoman appeared. She had been a student at Mana College and now she stood there in her uniform reciting Daddy.

Hunt recalls it with a look of disbelief: "She told me the whole f...ing poem out in front of how many people were at the festival. I thought, if only Sylvia could have seen something like that happen. Not that I'm anti-suicide. Far from it – I'm severely attracted to it. But it may have just stopped her so she could have kept on living and writing those phenomenal poems."

the Dominion Sam Hunt performs at Onslow College, Wellington, in 1982: 'It was proving the old theory that poems are there to be told.'

COMING BACK TO IT

The conversation has a tendency to drift. We were supposed to talk about Coming To It. Hunt explains that the title poem was written more than 30 years ago. "We're all just/coming to it." Back then he figured "it" was inspiration or a realisation. Now it means death – as well as inspiration, he hopes.

This would be a bizarre question in most circumstances, but how is Hunt's relationship with religion these days?

"I don't like clubs. I never joined the Boy Scouts or rugby clubs. I haven't joined the Jaycees yet, nor am I likely to. The concept of God, or gods more particularly in my case, is a human way of understanding the unknown. I pray a lot and I often wonder who I pray to, but I know I'm praying to some being, even if that being is in my head. Like I said earlier, I carry a gun in my head."

When he dies, "although I don't want any hoopla", he would like his friend Patrick Dunn, the Catholic Bishop of Auckland, to do a consecration.

"I'm not interested in the rest of the Mass but the consecration matters. That's the same process as making poems, you're making the word flesh. The words of the consecration matter a lot. When you ask about religion, I don't know whether that's religion or something else. It's poetry, really. Poetry covers all that for me."

A recent poem, Mum and Mary, involved Hunt dreaming that his mum, who died 14 years ago, is sharing a joint with Mary, the mother of Jesus.

"She may have been the Virgin but she was also a stoner," Hunt jokes.

Of course you have to have a certain reverence to be that irreverent. St Peter's College may have been pleased to see the back of him but there were benefits of his Catholic education, including having poet Ken Arvidson as an English teacher. History records that Arvidson gave Hunt the school's poetry prize. He also introduced Hunt to the work of Gordon Challis, a quieter New Zealand poet who became a friend and died only five months ago, aged 85.

Hunt called Challis' Poem for Magda one of the great New Zealand love poems and it reminds him that Challis' widow just sent him a small book of Challis' translations of Spanish poets. Decades ago, Challis turned him on to Black Stone on Top of a White Stone by Cesar Vallejo​ from Peru. It goes nicely with the wine from Chile.

"The shoulder bones, the loneliness, the rain and the roads ..." he says, and he wags his head and grins as the rhythm of the poem winds down. Lunch is done and Hunt is in a hurry to get away.

the Dominion Sam Hunt meets Prime Minister Robert Muldoon while on tour with friend and poet Gary McCormick, 1981.

SONGS FOR THE TONE DEAF

The long drive off a gravel road ends at a small wooden house with a view of the Kaipara Harbour. Near neighbours include broadcaster Paul Henry and musician Nigel Russell. Both are friends but everyone seems to know Hunt up here – even the AA man who arrives to pull a rental car out of the mud. He is as much a landmark as a neighbour.

A telescope in the lounge is pointed at the water. He scans for visitors through the other window.

The house feels like a hide-out. It's easy for journalists who make the pilgrimage north to compile Hunt's life story out of the objects on display. His sons' school photos on the walls, Pablo Neruda's Love Poems, a book open at Auden's The Shield of Achilles, Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde propped up like an icon against a bookshelf that contains Paul Henry's What Was I Thinking, a half-smoked joint in the ashtray.

He listens to a lot of Beethoven and Scriabin up here but puts on a CD he made with David Kilgour, The 9th. Hunt recited poems while the band played in an old pub in Port Chalmers. The room echoes. Kilgour's guitar sounds to him like "the water of Lourdes, uplifting and forgiving".

On one track, he is "even on the edge of singing," he claims. "I've always said my poems are songs for the tone deaf and I don't want to betray my original crowd. I don't want to start singing in tune. How uncool would it get? I'd sound like Marlon Williams. God bless him, but I don't want to sound like that."

On the CD, Hunt and band are doing The Seventh, a poem by Jozsef Attila that has been part of Hunt's repertoire for years. "In Hungary he's as well known as the Auckland Harbour Bridge is in Auckland."

The opening lines – "If you set out in this world ..." – have the same sense of a story launching that you get from the poem about hitch-hiking south. "It's the ultimate road code," Hunt says.

He remembers how he learned it. "When I was a child, a Hungarian woman, her name was Nora, she came out in 1956 as a refugee. Beautiful older woman. She had it. I don't mean she'd had it but she had it. Big difference. She had it. In my mind, still has it."

Supplied Sam Hunt with his dog Minstrel in 1983 at the Mana boat shed he called home.

As the day goes on, the past comes closer. Hunt starts a story about his mum at Castor Bay but loses the thread. He was 4 and a half when he started speaking, he says. A late starter like Einstein and Churchill. He was 25 when he first smoked cannabis: "I liked it but it didn't overtake my life."

The topic of religion comes back. The beauty and the mystery, the quiet and seclusion. But he wonders how you get past the Catholic sexual abuse issue.

"It seems incredibly sad that people who've had the dedication or the vocation to follow that rather peculiar life... but then again, the more I think about it in terms of my own peculiar life, I'm not surprised, really.

"It's a wonder I haven't ended up inside for something," he muses. "Robbing banks or... It's a life I've certainly enjoyed living."

Another book is coming in November. Sam Hunt: Off the Road by journalist Colin Hogg is a sequel of sorts to Angel Gear 30 years ago. That book was a lost weekend poetry tour, with the hotels and car parks and the poet's former sidekick, the dog Minstrel. But the new book? He seems a little dark about parts of it.

"This is off the road. A bit like your car, stuck in the mud. I'm not stuck in the mud, but I do get that feeling now and again.

"It's pretty harsh. It digs into things. There is some stuff you get from friends."

About what? "Alcoholism, addiction, saying that day by day I'm killing myself. At 72, I'm actually feeling quite OK."

He pauses. "I'll make a joint and stop worrying."

Coming To It: Selected Poems by Sam Hunt (Potton & Burton, $29.99).