The gas leak
Auckland University Press, 2006
The Gas Leak offers a glimpse of the gaps and cracks that can exist between family members in everyday life.
In the first section, a gas-fitter slips in and out of his own and other people’s lives with his ‘master key’, concerned by his strained marriage and his adulterous feelings for his wife’s sister. In the second, the ‘gothic comedy’ and ‘epic tragedy’ of his daughter’s teenage life is deftly and humorously handled, as she deals with friends, boyfriends, her alienated parents. The third section follows the gas-fitter’s wife as she copes with her own problems – including the Russian coursing hounds stealthily left in her basement – and deploys memory, poetry and dialogue with God in reaction to her ‘unrecognisable’ family and the everyday life she ‘can only continue’.
Buy The Gas Leak
The Gas Leak offers a glimpse of the gaps and cracks that can exist between family members in everyday life.
In the first section, a gas-fitter slips in and out of his own and other people’s lives with his ‘master key’, concerned by his strained marriage and his adulterous feelings for his wife’s sister. In the second, the ‘gothic comedy’ and ‘epic tragedy’ of his daughter’s teenage life is deftly and humorously handled, as she deals with friends, boyfriends, her alienated parents. The third section follows the gas-fitter’s wife as she copes with her own problems – including the Russian coursing hounds stealthily left in her basement – and deploys memory, poetry and dialogue with God in reaction to her ‘unrecognisable’ family and the everyday life she ‘can only continue’.
Buy The Gas Leak
Cover image "Ablage" (detail) by Rosa Loy
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“They lie in bed, staring / at the ceiling. / She wouldn't call marriage / a talking cure..." |
"Reviews
"Tightly controlled, full of sharply observant black comedy . . . her sly, sideways punning, judicious use of line breaks and ambiguous phrasing mean that the book floats free on its own merits." – Emma Neale, Dominion Post
"shrewdly lyrical, and most accomplished" – Murray Bramwell, New Zealand Books
". . . something new from this exciting talent. . . Jackson gives us poems torn with grief and filled with emotion. The Gas Leak is strong stuff. – Hamesh Wyatt, Otago Daily Times
"Jackson uses simple language deceptively well and echoes earlier themes and phrases to bring the poetic sequence to a satisfying and startling conclusion. It's not often I can say a poem is literally unreadable and absolutely perfect..Inspired by the sonnet sequence Ballade van de gasfitter by Gerrit Achterberg, The Gas Leak is a linked sequence of over 40 poems that reveal the deep secrets of an ordinary family, yet it develops to a point where it asks the great questions of life" – Sue Emms, Bay of Plenty Times
"Silence, such a significant tool for any poet, can add to the rhythm of a poem but it can also, as Jackson's poem so adroitly demonstrates, form the 'room' where the reader finds sanctuary to liberate the poem's inner life." Paula Green, from 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry
"With The Gas Leak, Jackson re-shelved herself in the Gothic section" - Erin Scudder, in the JNZL
