Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems

By Anna Jackson

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' 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. 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 slanted approach to lyric poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781775589716

Anna Jackson

Carl and Anna Jackson were raised in Christian homes with an emphasis on the holiness of God and the importance of living lives above reproach. They came from humble beginnings, Carl from Oklahoma, and Anna from Minnesota. Their upbringings were centered upon Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of their families. They were raised with strict adherence to the Word of God with great respect for what the Lord desired in all manner of living. A Christian college in Kansas is where they met, and they have been married for 60 years at the time of this writing. Carl and Anna Jackson have been in the pastoral ministry for most of their adult lives and have ministered in several states in the Midwest and Southwest, namely, Wisconsin, Arizona, Kansas and Oklahoma. Carl has produced his own broadcasts for several radio stations in the Tucson and the Phoenix areas, including KHEP AM-FM, KFLR FM in Phoenix, and KFLT, FAMILY LIFE RADIO, headquartered in Tucson and reaching across a number of other state lines. Carl and Anna have worked for several Christian ministries in Colorado and Oklahoma, including TEEN CHALLENGE OF ARZONA, INC., Tucson, Arizona. Their burden is to see that children, young people and adults realize their full potential as God intended for them to live. They desire to encourage and train members of the body of Christ to pray and intercede through God’s power.

Book preview

Part one: ‘I had a dream I was a ghost’

Sequences from AUP New Poets 1, The Long Road

to Teatime, Catullus for Children, The Gas Leak

and I, Clodia, and Other Portraits.

My friendship with Mayakovsky

The sun performs the introduction

The sun has taken to me.

It rarely comes out now

without stopping to talk.

I am expected to drop everything.

‘Have you met Mayakovsky?’

the sun asks one day, very casually,

waiting for my reaction.

To add to my discomfort

it slides a heavy UV ray

familiarly around my shoulders.

‘Your Russian protégé?

Isn’t he dead?’ I say.

‘That’s the one,’ beams the sun.

‘I persuaded him it would be futurist

to meet a girl in 1991.’

Mayakovsky’s hands are five-rayed

and he can move them right to left

and left to right.

He looks just like his photographs.

He looks different in every shot.

Sometime after the sun goes down, I take Mayakovsky to Debretts

Mayakovsky’s dress sense is marginal.

He doesn’t have a house card.

He is lucky to be admitted.

I am twenty-three but look as young

as the teenaged girls at the bar

sluicing out a week’s debris

from the polished floors of their skulls.

Mayakovsky laps it up.

Annoyed, I fling open the jewellery box

of my skull – Mayakovsky,

get a load of this!

Henry Miller looks over his shoulder.

‘You read too much.’

But Mayakovsky has stripped and plunged in,

he is on his knees before the treasures

of my mind, he runs a fat finger

over the fine inlays,

the minor delays,

the personal traits

and public exposés.

He climbed in a futurist

and climbs out a feminist.

After a dozen vodkas, we leave

Mayakovsky is so drunk he forgets to walk

and flies, a habit he picked up

in Heaven. But at Debretts!

Maaaaarginal . . . . . .

In my stiletto-heeled black leather boots

I calculate a route down the stairs

past Greg reclined in argument with Henry Miller.

Henry Miller calls Greg a cunt

and Jade picks anxiously at Greg’s sleeve.

Mayakovsky makes his farewells out in High St,

promises to fly straight

to Heaven and look up

my dreams.

He’ll be in touch.

Sure, I think. It’s not the first time

a celebrity has picked me up

and dropped me,

Mayakovsky.

Mayakovsky looks up my dreams

Whoa!

Mayakovsky throws down

his exhausted body

onto the nearest cloud.

Back in that sterile harmony,

the much vaunted Heaven.

After a couple of months,

Mayakovsky remembers his promise

to check out my dreams.

There is nothing else to do.

He mooches over to the AV centre.

‘The sun was right, you are a poetess!’

Mayakovsky materialises with gusto

so overcoloured in his haste

he bleaches out the walls

of my basement flat in Moray Place.

The mascara has run down his cheeks

from weeping over my dreams.

The depth of field! The suture!

The mise-en-scène!

Forgetting his undying love for Lili Brik,

he proposes!

He tenderly strokes my hair, and admires

the bridge of my nose.

‘It’s a poet’s right to be famous,’ Mayakovsky pronounces

We walk Dunedin’s bowl of streets

planning how to promote me.

Mayakovsky says, ‘Osip Brik would be our man

if I could only locate him –

Heaven’s a big place,

I’ve been looking for Lili sixty years.

But Dave Merritt! He’s famous

in Heaven, and I’ve heard

ever since watching Wings of Desire

he’s been hanging around on Earth,

a fallen angel in the Octagon.’

With a winged flick of his wrist

Dave Merritt pointed the way

to Dunedin’s Arts Collective Super 8

and to Gavin Shaw, its publishing machine.

The book launch

For the book launch we fly in plane loads

of vodka and caviar and the most famous people

we can think of: Rachel Hunter,

Madonna and Princess Diana.

Stacy will write up the event for MORE magazine.

Turns out these are the only people who show up.

Mayakovsky smuggles in some lethal ambrosia,

we all get drunk on spiked vodka

and make embarrassing disclosures.

At last we wash out into the night like Rimbaud,

the stars frou-frouing above us

as the footpath ebbs and flows.

Now we are all flying in the gutter

(though some of us are looking at the cars)

and then suddenly everything falls into space.

My death, my ascension

It is a pity, in a way, I never wake from the coma.

It is nice in Heaven, of course, when I get over my hangover.

They live well, the angels,

very well.

For a while I still see Mayakovsky sometimes

but imperceptibly we drift apart.

Later I learn he found his Lili Brik,

a chance meeting in the infinity of Heaven.

He held her as the sky holds the stars,

and she lay in his arms like a daisy-chain.

My second coming

I am so bored in Heaven

I stage a second coming.

I am born again in Dunedin.

I spend a couple of decades growing up.

Then I put on my purple velvet flares

over my red leotard,

zip up my black stiletto-heeled boots,

and go out to have a look around.

I get depressed.

All the people I know are dead.

I stop briefly at a few parties just to be polite

but no one comes up for my autograph.

Drunk on the alcohol of the future

I end up lost in the suburbs.

I call a taxi and ask for Moray Place.

It isn’t on the map.

‘You mean Jackson Street?’ the taxi driver

says, and I remember I am dead.

I start to cry. I tell the driver

just keep on driving till we hit Auckland.

The long road to teatime

The road to Karekare

In the middle of the journey

we found ourselves lost.

‘This is the jungle,’ said Johnny.

Rose asked if we had a map.

‘Not a road map,’ said Simon.