Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press, 2025
“Anna Jacksonโs glorious new collection, Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts, gets sunlight slipping through the loops of my thinking, reading, dreaming. The collection is offered as a seasonal loop as we move through summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer, and in this temporal movement, the loop regenerates, absorbing and delivering rhythms of living . . . mind and body . . . rhythms of writing . . . nouns, verbs, conjunctions . . . rhythms of thinking . . . and little by little . . . the compounding ideas, the feelings. Itโs poetry as looptrack: overloop, underloop, throughloop.”
Paula Green, Poetry Shelf
To celebrate placement on The Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist, I invited the four poets to choose some favourite things. First up Anna Jackson.
Anna Jackson chooses favourites
Four photos
(a favourite object, place, book cover, album)
my mix-tape cd collection is a favourite thing!
my favourite place would be, in bed, with the cat
Thee sets of three
3 Words? I donโt really have favourite words. I could say Lorna, Lucy and Peggy, the names of my three hens.
3 things that matter to me in poetry: I like surprise, a twist that goes somewhere unexpected but not random. I like repetition, the way it builds memory into a poem. And voice, I love it when I hear emotion in the way something is said.
3 poets who have inspired me: Catullus, obviously, but not counting Catullus, Frank OโHara, Wislawa Symborska, Helen Rickerby.
One question
Why does Terrier, Worrier matter to me?
Terrier, Worrier is made up of thoughts I was thinking during the Covid lockdowns and at the time I felt some urgency to write them down and not forget them, which was a very temporary impulse. I donโt write down thoughts any more. But then I had what felt like raw material, that I wanted to work with the way you might want to work with clay or with fabric samples youโd collected. I felt like using them up. And I like what I made out of them.
An extract from Terrier, Worrier
I remember sitting in the car after work, not wanting to turn on the windshield wipers because I felt like I needed the rain on the windshield to do the work of crying for me.
I thought, every body is a memory palace.
I dreamed I was in conversation with a photographer who had been photographing a series of traumatic scenes, a series of photographs both terrible and beautiful. But, before he could exhibit them, before he could even print them, he exposed all the film, and all the images were lost. Now, he wondered, did he have to go through everything again, re-enact the scenes, in order to recreate the images?
I thought, I donโt know why I translate Catullus over and over again, but it happens and I feel it, I feel like I am split in two.
I thought, when I am Catullus, writing as Sappho, as Ariadne, as Attis, as Procne, am I bird or birdsong? The journey, or the backwards glance?
I sat in the car with my daughter, tears running down our faces. Then I laughed, and turned the windscreen wipers off.
Anna Jackson
from Terrrier, Worrier
Anna Jackson is the author of seven collections of poetry as well as Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writersโ Diaries 1915โ1962 (Routledge, 2010) and Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (Auckland University Press, 2022). She lives in Island Bay, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and is professor in English literature at Te Herenga Waka โ Victoria University of Wellington.
Anna Jacksonโs website
Auckland University Press page
Poetry Shelf review
Anna and Paula in conversation on Poetry Shelf
Anna chooses an extract from Terrier, Worrier (longlist feature)
NZ Poetry Shelf 