He attended St Peter's College where he was in the same class as Sam Hunt[1] and was taught "for two important senior years" by K O Arvidson.
His doctoral thesis, supervised by Wystan Curnow, was on the subject, The Antagonistic City: A Design for Urban Imagery in Seven American Poets.
Locke's third book of poems Maketu (concerning Phillip Tapsell) was published in 2003 and his fourth collection, Ranging around the zero, appeared in 2014[9] and Tending the Landscape of the Heart (2019).
That poem quotes Walt Whitman from Song of Myself: Having pried through the strata, analysed to a hair,/ counsel'd with doctors and calculated close,/I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
Both poems are largely dominated by family concerns, particularly Locke's relationship with his wife, her pregnancy and the eventual birth of their daughter.
Tapsell was involved in the retribution against the Māori iwi concerned, Ngā Puhi, giving rise to the main poems The Ballad of the good ship Boyd, The Retribution and The Shadow, a description of, and reflection on, Tapsell's first marriage, to Maria Ringa, a Ngā Puhi woman (Thomas Kendall married them – but she left Tapsell soon after) and his second marriage, to another Ngā Puhi woman, solemnised by Samuel Marsden, which also ended quickly, with her death.
[12] The later experience of Tapsell and Hineiturama (who were formally married by Bishop Pompallier in 1841) is referred to in the poems The Revenger's tragedy and The artefact.
[citation needed] The sequence is referenced to the moment and place (Maketu) where Locke first heard of Tapsell: "The day was fine.