Rhythms of daily life

By ELEANOR BLACK

Anna Jackson's brain is stored in a computer, so when there is a power cut, or something goes wrong with her hard drive, the Auckland poet is bereft.

An elfin blonde with wholesome rosy cheeks and a naughty laugh, Jackson relies on technology to make sense of her tumbling thoughts, and to communicate with colleagues in faraway cities.

The computer which runs her life is in her office at the University of Auckland, where she teaches literature students. For good measure, there is a computer in her study at home, a cheerfully messy Mt Albert do-up she shares with partner Simon Edmonds and two children, Johnny, 7, and Elvira, 5.

Jackson uses both to great effect. The 34-year-old's second book, The Pastoral Kitchen, was a finalist in the poetry category of this year's Montana New Zealand Book Awards and her first solo effort, The Long Road to Teatime, met with gushing critical acclaim, marking Jackson as one of our most promising poets.

But she is not a poet, she says, shaking her messy blonde hair and hugging her knee. Poets are ethereal creatures who write romantic whimsies on the back of envelopes. She is a chronicler of daily life.

Her themes tend to be domestic, but she has a knack for clattering the teacups by adding unexpected snatches of grim reality to her poetry - violence in East Timor, global economics, environmental destruction. Sometimes her children, often part of her poetry, introduce politics to the table, as demonstrated in her as yet-unpublished third book with the working title Catullus for Children.

Catullus was a Roman who lived between 84BC and 54BC and wrote extravagant poems naming his political and personal enemies and their misdeeds.

"His big threat is always, if you do that I'll write a poem about it and people will know what you did 2000 years later," says Jackson. "The fierceness, passion, over-the-topness of Catullus - that's exactly my son Johnny."

In the tradition of Catullus, Jackson wants her poetry to serve as a warning to multinationals who would gobble up the landscape and dull our culture. She is frustrated by her tendency to instead describe in delightful detail her children's fantasies, trips to the beach, and the joy of finding good shoes.

Jackson's home looks like two small tornadoes hit it, which is exactly what happened after she tidied and made plunger coffee minutes ago. Her children are outside now, waiting for their father to take them on an errand. The table Jackson has barricaded herself behind is splattered in blue paint. A toy gun sits on top of a sheaf of papers covered in wavery pen drawings next to an abandoned fairy cup. A shoe lies on the sofa. On the mantel, leaning against a cherry-red wall, is a child's drawing in which the sky is filled with hearts. You can see why Jackson's thoughts would return here.

She grew up in a similarly stimulating home where literature was the fourth child. Her father, Mac Jackson, is an English professor at the University of Auckland, her mother, Nicole, is a librarian. As children, Jackson and her siblings, Juliet and Cameron, were encouraged to take a shopping trundler to the library and fill it with books. When the poet was about six years old, she was given a hand-me-down typewriter. Her first thought was, "Right, now I can start my career." Her first story was about a little girl whose favourite colour was red.

Because her father studied poetry, the young Jackson thought anyone who became a poet was treated like a VIP and their work taken seriously. She wanted to be revered in the way that Shelley and Keats were. It was disappointing to find that most people take little notice of poets, she says with a scowl. Instead, they are tossed in the same basket as people who crochet and dabble in watercolours.

"There's always this feeling that no-one reads poetry anyway - it's not like being a novelist."

It is with some excitement, then, that she is ploughing through her first novel, despite its celebration of the "daily moment, little things".

"It's even less political [than my poetry]," she says with exasperation. "It's got even less in it."

Begun last year when she was Waikato University's writer in residence, the novel was meant to comment on the benefit cuts of 1991, but has twice shifted focus. She hopes to spend the summer reshaping it, and is unsure how it will turn out.

While writing the novel has been, at times, a frustrating experience, it's cake compared to her doctoral thesis, Towards a Poetics of the Diary. After finishing her master's degree at the University of Auckland nine years ago, Jackson won an Oxford scholarship. Without a burning desire to become a DPhil, she nonetheless enjoyed her English sojourn, during which she holidayed in Spain and had a baby. "I came up with a topic because I needed a topic. I went because I had a scholarship to go. It wasn't something I fiercely wanted to do."

Then the grant ran out, she returned to Auckland with a toddler and had to write a thesis with sporadic academic support. "The doctorate ended up becoming the most hated thing in my life," she says with a grimace. It took another three years to finish, squeezed around teaching, the birth of her second child, and writing poetry. Jackson's latest project is a collaboration with Dunedin poet Jenny Powell-Chalmers. The women "steal" ideas from one another to use in their own poetry. "It's the opposite kind of deal from worrying about plagiarism," says Jackson, who has let go of traditional stanzas and developed a new theme based on her colleague's work.

She had wanted to write about the family's two pet mice for some time, but never found a place for them in her work. Powell-Chalmers is writing a series about the Madonna, which gave Jackson the inspiration for The Madonna of the Mice (see sidebar), about the mice who live in her study at home. They used to be kept in her daughter's bedroom but the nocturnal squeaking of their wheel kept the little girl awake.

Politics, always in Jackson's thoughts, has jumped to the forefront as the general election approaches. For a woman with little faith in the way the world is run, voting effectively is as important as raising thoughtful and healthy children. And it is to children that she looks for an example of the way things ought to be done.

"If children are playing a game, or decide to do anything, they get everyone involved. You have an aim in mind and if someone's not terrifically good at things they will still be able to fetch and carry. Things just seem to get done in a way that involves everyone."

The implosion of her favourite party, the Alliance, has left Jackson in a quandary. She wants to support Laila Harre, but wonders if there is much point. Typically, her electorate choice is based on a personal experience.

"I'll vote for Phil Goff in my electorate because he helped me out when I got all confused about a tax thing once and it all got beyond me. I'm loyal to him to the grave now."