Author(s): Anna Jackson

Poetry | Literature

A brilliant introduction to how poetry works through one hundred poems.Through illuminating readings of one hundred poems - from Catullus to Alice Oswald, Shakespeare to Hera Lindsay Bird - Actions & Travels is an engaging introduction to how poetry works. Ten chapters look at simplicity and resonance, imagery and form, letters and odes, and much more. In Actions & Travels Anna Jackson explains how we can all read (and even write) poetry.

‘From a thoughtful and zestful poet, Actions & Travels is an open-minded look at one of humanity’s dazzling arts. Every sentence brims over with Anna Jackson’s informed love of poetry, its fun and its gravity, its wildness and its variety. Ranging from the ancient to the tweeted, she helps novices without sounding like a primer, and tosses the experts bones to quarrel over. If you read just one book about poetry this year, this should be the one.’ — Michael Hulse

‘In Actions & Travels, Anna Jackson hosts a literary dinner party that takes place both on the page and online. As she seats poets from different times and places next to one another and deftly draws them into conversation about their dress codes, values and behaviour, we find ourselves part of one big family arguing and communing in the eternal now of poetry.
If you’ve ever questioned what poems are up to when they “wax poetical”, or wondered what Keats and Hera Lindsay Bird would say to each other if they actually met, or what would happen if Patricia Lockwood and Tayi Tibble traded jokes on Twitter, this book is for you.
But really, anyone who reads poems or wants to write them will benefit from eavesdropping on the lively and engaging dialogues in Actions & Travels, and trying out the writing prompts that follow.’  — Chris Price

Anna Jackson is a New Zealand poet who grew up in Auckland and now lives in Island Bay, Wellington. She has a DPhil from Oxford and is an associate professor in English literature at Victoria University of Wellington. Anna made her poetry debut in AUP New Poets 1 before publishing six collections with Auckland University Press. Her most recent book, Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems, gathers work from her previous collections as well as twenty-five new poems. The book includes poems from Catullus for Children and I, Clodia, the two collections that engage with the work of Catullus, as well as poems about badminton, billiards, salty hair, takahe, head lice, indexing, proof-reading, hens, truth and beauty. As a scholar, Anna Jackson is the author of Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers' Diaries 1915-1962 (Routledge, 2010) and, with Charles Ferrall, Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850-1950: The Age of Adolescence (Routledge, 2009).