ACTIONS & TRAVELS: HOW POETRY WORKS
by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, $35)
Neither textbook nor scholarly intervention, Anna Jackson’s Actions & Travels is instead more like a guide to a country whose landscapes, vistas and history await discovery for the curious first-time visitor and further discovery for the returnee. She makes for a deeply knowledgeable, warm and enthusiastic guide to the territory.
One of the book’s strengths is the diversity of poems across place and time: William Butler Yeats next to Bill Manhire, Catullus beside Janet Charman, John Donne by James K. Baxter. You needn’t love all of the 100 poems on offer, but you will certainly find plenty to discover or to read differently. The book includes a set of useful writing prompts for those inspired enough by the journey to want to contribute to the tradition.
Jackson groups some poems by craft, some by style and some by subject matter, including political poetry and “Poetry & the afterlife”. Such broad groupings reveal how certain aspects of poetry cut across time and style, taking on local textures — say, how understanding The Red Wheelbarrow by the modernist
William Carlos Williams allows for greater appreciation of Jenny Bornholdt’s poem, Photograph.
Sometimes Jackson’s brief dives into scholarly distinctions and vocabulary mean potentially challenging close readings, for example of Sappho and Catullus in the interesting chapter “Conversations with the past”. At their best and most accessible, her readings elucidate the complexities of the poem. In Hone Tuwhare’s poem Hotere, she draws our attention to “the perfectly placed colloquialisms” and the effect of the “rising inflection” of the tone, both strategic decisions on Tuwhare’s part. At other times I wished she had aimed the impressive lens of her experience more fully on some of the other poems, like work by Kay Ryan, Elizabeth Bishop, Jericho Brown and Terrance Hayes.
Of course, there also are the inevitable might-havebeens with regard to which poets to include. I would have given more attention in the “Sprawl” chapter to such poets as Alan Shapiro, Mark Doty or David Kirby (and indeed to Jenny Bornholdt). But so what? That’s poetry — a field in which there are no answers, only arguments. That, after all, is what makes poetry a living art form, makes it a community rather than a museum, filled with interest and beauty and surprise. This, more or less, is the point of Jackson’s useful and approachable book, which generously and successfully characterises poetry as a long, interesting conversation worth entering.
The interesting idiosyncrasies of her choices and structure are in fact part and parcel of Jackson’s implicit argument about the relationship between the reader and the poem. She doesn’t expect a reader to agree with her choices or her opinions. She says so directly, urging the reader to peruse and consider the poems — there’s a web link — before reading any given chapter, thus “forming their own sense of the poems that can be compared with mine”.
Jackson’s argument for the role of the reader is implicit, too, in the epigraph from the poet Anne Carson: “I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on the page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action.”
What I think Jackson wants most is for readers, whatever they decide about a given poem, is to be touched by poetry and to engage with it. As the epigraph concludes, “by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference”.