Anna Jackson



On Speaking and Unheard Women: Interrogating Classical Silence in the Poetry of Anna Jackson and Helen Rickerby

When we meet Cassandra in Aeschylus’s ‘Agamemnon’ – this stolen princess, this famed beauty turned ill-starred prophet, hauled onstage as Agamemnon’s prize for victory over the Trojans – she is silent for 270 lines.

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Jessica Wilkinson Interviews Anna Jackson

New Zealand poet and academic Anna Jackson’s presence easily fills a large room. At the Verse Biography: Truth or Beauty? conference in Wellington last November (of which Jackson was one of the three organisers), her enthusiasm for lively poetic discussion and debate is clear – abundant questions and wild tangents exhibit a mind tumbling with ideas bursting to be explored.

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Review Short: Anna Jackson’s I, Clodia, and Other Portraits

Early in this collection, Clodia demands to be ‘loved by one of the new poets’ (4). Instead of beginning with the poet’s invocation of a muse, the muse of I, Clodia seems to summon the poet. Over 34 pages, Jackson imagines Clodia Metelli, the witty, promiscuous Roman aristocrat generally believed to have been the subject, ‘Lesbia’, of Catullus’s love poems – his interlocutor – her voice dovetailing easily with his. This biographical sequence is followed by another, observing an unnamed photographer during ‘the worst disaster of her career –/ this photographing of faces, this creation/ of ‘portraits’’ (41). The poet’s potential as portraitist and biographer preoccupies I, Clodia.

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Black-figured Greek urn (lekythos), dreaming

Perhaps the urn was made all those years ago not to hold oil, which it has never held, not as the ground for the pictures, which have chipped off, though a hand remains unattached to a person, not to be …

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Trans-Tasman: Book Reviews and Best New Zealand Poetry 2013

It’s 2014. Time to expand / add to the Trans-Tasman conversation on poetics between Australia and New Zealand. The Best New Zealand Poems 2013 has now been published. Online only. Check it out. Congratulation to Murray Edmond, Anne Kennedy and …

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Conversation about Coleridge

So you know how I reminded you of how I’d said Coleridge invented the word subconscious, and then I said but I don’t think I can have been right? Well, while you all went on to the pub to talk …

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Virgil at Bedtime

Anna Jackson lives in Island Bay, Wellington. Her latest collection of poetry is Catullus for Children, Auckland University Press.

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The Ceiling Becomes a Marble Slab

Anna Jackson's most recent collection is Catullus for Children (2003) – not really a book of poetry for children, but a new experiment within the tradition of translating Catullus into English.

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Nothing Suggests Adulterous Proceedings

Anna Jackson has published three books of poetry with Auckland University Press.

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Life Seems to Be Enclosed in Steel and Nickel

Anna Jackson lectures at Victoria University of Wellington, mostly in American literature.

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Frank O’Hara for Charles

Anna Jackson lives in Island Bay, Wellington, New Zealand.

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