Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems

Overview

There are some poets you travel the routes ofso often you could feel your way in the dark,that turn, that corner, and then the plummettowards the end. What does it give you, after all,to meet in person in a room? A thoughtthe dog doesn’t share, when, having knownthe followed route, the stored scent,an affair of the air, here isthe other dog! Incarnate! Guessed and host! ‘Poets know words, know routes, know ghosts’Uneasy nights out with dead Russian poets, dalliances with German gasfitters and emotionally fraught games of badminton are brought together for the first time, along with a brand new body of work, in this time-spanning selection of Anna Jackson’s poetry. Local gothic, suburban pastoral and answerings-back to literary icons are all enhanced by Jackson’s light hand and sly humour. Pastoral yet gritty, intellectual and witty, sweet but with stings in their tails, the poems and sequences collected in Pasture and Flock are essential reading for both long-term and new admirers of Jackson’s slanted approach to lyric poetry.

Author Biography

Anna Jackson made her debut in AUP New Poets 1 before publishing six collections with Auckland University Press, most recently I, Clodia, and Other Portraits (2014). She has a DPhil from Oxford, and is now an associate professor in English literature at Victoria University of Wellington. Jackson is the author of Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 (2010) and, with Charles Ferrall, British Juvenile Fiction 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence (2009).