Thicket

‘These are our thicket days / and it does seem darker, / though the sun is at its peak / over the crown of leaves.’

In Anna Jackson’s fifth collection of poetry Thicket, a rich and leafy life is closing in on the poet.

But a thicket is also something to walk out of, and Jackson offers us fairytale breadcrumb tracks to follow, through poems that consider badminton at dusk, Virgil at bedtime, theory over wine; shimmering, multi-faceted poems of swans and puppets, sons and brothers, a woman who has become a tree.

Thicket is an accomplished book from a poet of unease, who constantly turns her attention to the brambled path, the track less-followed, the subterranean presences in everyday life.

Author

Wellington-based, Auckland-born poet Anna Jackson bought an electric typewriter in her twenties and began writing poetry which she published in small magazines put together with groups of friends, before a selection of these poems was published in AUP New Poets 1 (1999). She has since published four poetry collections with Auckland University Press. She teaches in the English Department at Victoria University of Wellington and is also the author of Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 and, with Charles Ferrall, Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850-1950: The Age of Adolescence. She is a co-editor of The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders and Floating Worlds: Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction.

Prizes

• Finalist, 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards