Pasture and Flock
Auckland University Press, 2018
From “My Friendship with Mayakovsky” to “I, Clodia,” Anna Jackson has claimed a place alongside the sunniest and most shadowed poets, following her own life into darkness and deep waters, finding herself more uncomfortable becalmed, in waters saline and still as contact lens solution. This selection of work from six collections also includes a substantial selection of new poems, looking “from just behind her eyes” at a world no less strange or haunted, including tombs, sheep, linen, radishes, trains, a cooking show (not yet released), sunscreen, fireworks, a newly hatched chick struggling to live, and dogs both seen and guessed at.
Buy Pasture and Flock
From “My Friendship with Mayakovsky” to “I, Clodia,” Anna Jackson has claimed a place alongside the sunniest and most shadowed poets, following her own life into darkness and deep waters, finding herself more uncomfortable becalmed, in waters saline and still as contact lens solution. This selection of work from six collections also includes a substantial selection of new poems, looking “from just behind her eyes” at a world no less strange or haunted, including tombs, sheep, linen, radishes, trains, a cooking show (not yet released), sunscreen, fireworks, a newly hatched chick struggling to live, and dogs both seen and guessed at.
Buy Pasture and Flock
Cover by Keely O'Shannessey
"Classical references to Horace and Sappho, James K Baxter and barnacles, hens and the ever present ghosts which lurk everywhere in this collection. I loved ‘Aline, waiting her turn’ about a young poet “hunched in her hoodie”, waiting for an old poet on stage to finish her performance." Review by Marcus Hobson, NZ Booklovers. "Anna Jackson's Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (AUP) delivers the quirkiest, unexpected, physical, cerebral poetry around." Paula Green, Poetry Shelf An interview with Paula Green about the book has been posted on Poetry Shelf. A terrific review from Harry Ricketts on the National Radio can be heard here. ‘Office pastoral’, ‘On my way elsewhere’, ‘Late swim’ and ‘Poets know words, know routes, know ghosts’: here are other newly published poems that show just how inventive and magical Jackson’s poetic exploration of the seemingly unremarkable is. Review by Siobhan Harvey, Landfall Online "This book should be twice as long" - Hamesh Wyatt, Otago Daily Times (in a review that also brilliantly captures the "hyper-masculine romanticism" of Chris Tse's He's So Masc). "The poems capture experiences, from the sublime to the everyday, conveying a lyricism to a life of never-ending curiosity, adventures (both large and small), interiority, books, academia (ups-and-downs) and love." Marguerite Johnson, International Journal of the Classical Tradition |
“We all felt it. / We all had wine to drink, the dregs / in our glasses covered over with a new tide / of wine from a new bottle, a taste / like the tone of a clarinet with an old reed" |
