John Barr (poet)
John Barr of Craigilee (24 October 1809 – 18 September 1889) was a Scottish–New Zealand poet.
Biography
[edit]Born in Paisley, Scotland in 1809, Barr moved to Otago in 1852, and farmed a property at Halfway Bush.[1] In 1857 he moved with his wife Mary Jamieson (née Lamb) and their four children to Balclutha, and established a farm which he called Craigilee. He was the founder of the New Zealand Robert Burns Society.[2] In his time, he was considered the Laureate of Otago Province, of which he wrote, in Lowland Scots:
- There's nae place like Otago yet,
- There's nae wee beggar weans,
- Or auld men shivering at our doors
- To beg for scraps or banes
By Feb 1862 John was in Dunedin when he printed a 'little volume' of poems, published in Edinburgh. The 'Otago Daily Times' wrote ... "quite irrespective of their local character, which endows them with a peculiar attraction, the Poems possess intrinsic merits in themselves which entitle them to rank high as literary productions"
Allen Curnow described his writing as "this Scots-colonial parritch... watery gruel at the best." Barr died on 18 September 1889 at Dunedin.[3]
References
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/John_Barr_memorial_plaque_in_Dunedin.jpg/220px-John_Barr_memorial_plaque_in_Dunedin.jpg)
- Curnow, Allen (ed) The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse
- ^ Writers in Residence, by Jenny Robin Jones, Auckland University Press, 2004
- ^ Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, Oxford University Press, 1997.
- ^ Cooper, Ronda. "Barr, John - Biography". Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Retrieved 19 July 2012.