His poetry appears in several major New Zealand anthologies, he has written books about literary history and art, and his first novel was published in October 2020.
[2] He grew up on a sheep farm at Port Underwood in the Marlborough Sounds,[3] and started writing poetry in his early teens after being encouraged by a schoolteacher.
[5]: 23:39 Newton later returned to higher education and completed a Masters of Arts degree on contemporary New Zealand poetry at the University of Canterbury in 1987.
"[12] Iain Sharp, reviewing the collection, noted the inclusion of the poem "Opening the Book", calling it a "much-anthologised meditation on the blurring of real and imagined versions of the New Zealand landscape, already regarded as a minor classic".
[13] Hamesh Wyatt in the Otago Daily Times described Newton's poetry as "beautiful in places, grand and joyous in others".
David Eggleton, writing in the New Zealand Listener, described the collection as presenting "a metropolitan's love-hate relationship with the provincial backblocks where he grew up, on the farm", and praised the way Newton "craftily renders a high Modernist tranche of theatre country, saturated in art and literature, layer upon layer like a rich trifle".
[20] In 2009, Newton's book The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem Commune was published by Victoria University Press.
[9] Writing in the Waikato Times, reviewer Peter Dornauf said: "Double Rainbow is a scholarly, readable and fascinating account of events at the tipping point in our cultural history.
After the review, Newton was asked by another journalist why he left the subject of Baxter's relationships with members of the commune at Jerusalem out of his 2009 book Double Rainbow; Newton explained that during his preparatory research it was clear that people did not want to cause Sturm embarrassment, and further that he felt that these issues would drown out "the bicultural dimension, the collaboration between the pā and the hippies".
He said he intended to use the time to write the second instalment of his New Zealand literature trilogy, following on from Hard Frost, which will cover the 1946 to 1968 period.
[27] Newton had decided to write the book after living and working in a cottage in Christchurch that had been loaned to him by Summers: "I thought it would repay some of the kindness he showed me.