'They were the best I had yet written. They came to me then, when everything I knew was threatened with destruction, as a spontaneous welling up of life in the face of death. I did not choose to write them: they rose in me unbidden. One writes poetry neither by choice nor by chance but because one must, according to one's powers, great or small; must and can are the two faces of that necessity. These pieces were very few, and slight enough, but they had a quiet salt tang of imaginative truth and reality. They were unexpected; in them I discovered the New Zealand I knew and did not know.'

(Indirections, p.360).This was Brasch's second poetry book and features his 'Waitaki Revisited.'

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Brasch first met Mary Ursula Bethell in 1938. A pioneer in modern New Zealand poetry, Bethell held the notion that people had distinct roles, which she liked to define for them. According to Brasch, she told him to give up poetry - she did not favour his - and become a patron. New Zealand is fortunate on both counts: he continued writing poetry and he became a generous patron.

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'It was to be my greatest difficulty to conceive and write poems that were mine and no-one else's, to find my own voice, live my own life - which is a question not of originality, nor of sincerity, but of authenticity.' Brasch's own voice is found in The Estate, perhaps his most accomplished volume of poetry. Brasch never knew his great-grandfather, yet in the conversational 'Letter from Thurlby Domain', there is a mood of reconciliation to and acceptance of both the past and the present.

The Estate and other poems. Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1957.

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Dunedin, Waitaki and Wakatipu were special places for Brasch. Wakatipu, one of the triumvirate, meant space, freedom, and solitude. Being there also created in him a sense of belonging, an intimate tie with a small circle of friends and family. In his papers at the Hocken Library, there are manuscript accounts of his walking ventures. Photographs also feature, which depict picnic scenes, tramping, and a general enjoyment of the natural surroundings of the South Island. Here is Brasch rock climbing.

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