Anna Jackson is the author of seven poetry collections, including Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts, shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She lives in Island Bay, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, where she teaches English literature at Victoria University of Wellington.

What first drew you to poetry, and what keeps you coming back to it?

I like how quickly you can read a poem and how often you can return to it, how easy it is to share with a text or an online post, and how lines or images from a poem can suddenly enter your mind when you least expect them.

Tell us about your shortlisted collection. What inspired it, or what do you hope readers discover in its pages?

Terrier, Worrier is an experiment in noticing what I am thinking, and so it is full of everything I was thinking about for a year – not much for a whole year if you look at it that way. I hope readers will be interested in some of the thoughts – on chicken psychology, anger as a kind of joy, what age we are after we die – but also maybe interested in noticing the pattern of their own thoughts and maybe having thoughts in response to some of mind.

National Poetry Day is all about encouraging people to read and enjoy poetry. If you could recommend one poem (or poet) for someone who thinks poetry isn't for them, what would you choose and why?

They might like Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “In Praise Of My Sister,” which begins “My sister doesn’t write poems,” and includes the lines “When my sister asks me over for lunch, / I know she doesn’t want me to read her poems.”

Where do poems usually find you? Do you have a favourite place, ritual or unexpected moment when ideas tend to arrive?

I can only write when I am completely alone and usually only after I have been alone a long time and don’t expect anyone else to arrive any time soon.

Is there a line of poetry that has stayed with you over the years? We'd love to hear it (and why it continues to resonate).

Oh, that is easy – the one line I repeat to myself every few days or so is “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense…” Sometimes I keep going, “ as though of hemlock I had drunk / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk…” I say it whenever I am feeling sorry for myself, or have a headache, or feel a drowsy numbness coming on, as it often does.

Now that a little time has passed since the awards, what are you working on next, or what can readers look forward to from you?

I have about a hundred half finished pieces of writing. I have all kinds of ideas for books about poetry, and books about hens, and a sonnet sequence setting the Catullus poems in High School that I’d like to see in print one day, a little love story with lines like this: “you, a magnet and I, quivering filings / you, a window and I, quivering air.”