Pasture and Flock

Media Release

Pasture and Flock

Anna Jackson

Auckland University Press
Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 148 pages
8 MARCH 2018, $34.99
Poetry
The latest collection of poetry from Anna Jackson is pastoral yet gritty, sweet but with a sting.
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.

There are some poets you travel the routes of
so often you could feel your way in the dark,
that turn, that corner, and then the plummet
towards the end. What does it give you, after all,
to meet in person in a room? A thought
the dog doesn’t share, when, having known
the followed route, the stored scent,
an affair of the air, here is
the other dog! Incarnate! Guessed and host!
‘Poets know words, know routes, know ghosts’

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 varied and slanted approach to lyric poetry.

Anna Jackson made her debut in AUP New Poets 1before publishing six collections with Auckland University Press, most recently I, Clodia (2014). She has a DPhil from Oxford and is 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).

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