Poems Stolen from George Wilder

Poems Stolen from George Wilder

The recidivist 60s thief and prison escapee, George Wilder, has been robbed.

A collection of ruminations based on the Kiwi folk hero’s life has been taken from his former hideout on the remote western shores of Lake Taupo.

The burglar, New Zealand author, Antonios Papaspiropoulos, spent six months holed up in Wilder’s hideout earlier this year and says he got to know George so well from living there, a book was the only escape.

“I was on the run too,” he says. “From life. I needed a break from the rat-race so I withdrew to this picturesque place and lay low for a while. I took some time to steal some thoughts away.”

The result is Poems from the George Wilder Cottage, which is launched today - a poetry cycle interspersed with real life anecdotes from people who “ran in” to Wilder during his years on the run.

In the 1960s, Wilder touched the hearts, minds (and property) of many New Zealanders. He escaped from jail three times and demonstrated great gall and ingenuity, joining in his own manhunts, disappearing down drainpipes, sending police dogs back to their bosses with different items of his clothing.

The Howard Morrison Quartet even immortalised him in song.

“He was a kind of light-handed, light-hearted Harry Houdini,” Papaspiropoulos says. “The prisons couldn’t contain him, the cops couldn’t catch him and the public developed a soft spot for him because he left these endearing `thank you’ notes behind. They were like poems.”

Belted out late at night on an old `Brother’ portable typewriter, Poems from the George Wilder Cottage is littered with love, history and situation comedy:

- the bride still angry because George stole the groom’s tuxedo from the washing line on wedding day;

- the elderly man who remembers George sending the constabulary off in the wrong direction by wearing his boots backwards;

- the arresting officer who found George with a cache of cars buried in the bush because George liked to take wild joyrides.

In the book’s Prologue, musician and poet, the late Graham Brazier says Wilder was New Zealand’s answer to Robin Hood, Ned Kelly and Davy Crockett.

“In the early 1960s, we were hungry for someone to relate to, someone who wasn’t an All Black. He was a loner, a petty thief, a gentleman rogue.

Papaspiropoulos, living in the farm dwelling that was once the refuge for the escaped outlaw, has through some ghostly osmosis channelled a set of poems through the eyes of the grey stoned New Zealand prison institutions.”

Artichokes
like you or I
(dear George)
are just thistles with soft hearts
growing wild in a robber’s garden…”

(from Song for a Folk Hero)

Poems from the George Wilder Cottage (RRP $25) is an 86-page rumination on what happens when you run out of road, and take time to stop and smell the roses.

ENDS

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