Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works

by Anna Jackson

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.

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Eddy Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book felt quite out of my comfort zone but I really enjoyed it! A great read for getting you to slow down and really take what the author is saying in. Excited to revisit it in the future, once I have hopefully read a bit more poetry :))

[Frazer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book, inside and out. It's small (just over 200 pages) but dense, packing in extracts from and Jackson's thoughts on 100 English language poems from Donne to sam sax. The physical book reflected this - it felt solid and study in my hands, with attractive typesetting and cover art bearing them imprint of the canvas's texture.

I was interested to learn that Jackson has a doctorate from Oxford. Indeed, reading this was a bit like reading a tutorial essay, but only in all the best ways. She brings a great freshness to these poems, writing about them as if she only set eyes on them a few days ago and she's still in love with them. She brings a sense of curiosity and wonder and the power of words to move. Her writing is energetic and comes with the kinds of insights brilliant young scholars are so good at making. It's tightly written and so should be read with with equal concentration.

I liked how (I think) she gave away which of the poems were her particular favourites. Her joy at Catullus stood out for me, and it's great she has the language skills to analyse the original Latin and hazard her own translations. This benefits from not pretending to be free from Jackson herself.

The only way this could have been improved would be for the poems to be included in full. They're available on Jackson's website but there was no way I was going to interrupt the reading experience by fetching them.

This deserves to be read widely!

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This lovely book feels as if it were written just for me...

Anna Jackson may be familiar to some readers as the New Zealand author of The Bedmaking Competition, which won the 2018 Viva La Novella competition and the 2019 Mascara Avant-garde award for fiction. I reviewed it here. But Jackson is also a poet with a DPhil from Oxford and she's an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington.  Auckland University Press has published her six poetry collections, and she's also the author of a couple of impressive-sounding academic texts published by Routledge.  But Actions and Travels, How Poetry Works is not an academic text.  It's written for people like me, who don't feel confident about discussing poetry. This is the blurb:

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 explore 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.

It comes with this endorsement:

‘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

The Intro begins by acknowledging the doubts felt by the uninitiated:

For some readers, contemporary poetry can seem icier in its unknowability then the poetry of the past.  Written without rhyme or metre, what even makes it poetry?  The line break?  For other readers, contemporary poetry is just another form of conversation between friends — including strangers befriending themselves to their readers through their poetry — while poetry of the past seems unapproachable without a knowledge of metrical scansion or historical context.  (p.2)

She goes on to reassure the reader that no particular scholarly knowledge is needed to read any of the poems... and that her discussions about them are not themselves very scholarly.   She writes about the poems she loves, through the lens of the her chapter headings.  The poems range from canonical works to contemporary works, and include the lesser-known as well as the famous. The poems under discussion are printed in the book, but you can also read them at her website.

Chapter One: Simplicity & Resonance is about those poems that cast a spell on the reader.  A poetic resonance holds a moment open, binding both the reader and the poem's speaker in time and space.  I liked most of her choices which included Emily Brontë's ‘Spellbound’, Robert Frost's, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and ‘After Apple-Picking’ and Bill Manhire's, ‘Across Brooklyn’ but we nearly parted company over Rebecca Gayle Howell's ‘A Catalogue of What You Do Not Have’ which apparently went viral on Twitter during the pandemic.  Jackson says that its absolute simplicity spoke to how undefined but how vast the sense of loss, and lack, has been for so many people.  The poem consists only of its title, and one word: 'enough'.  I absolutely cannot be bothered with something like that masquerading as poetry.

(Clearly, I am no expert, but this is 'a bone' I will quarrel over, and it's not the only one!)

A poem that has resonance for me is by Subhash Jaireth. It's dedicated to Tibetan monks and it's in his collection Aflame.

Moving on...

I had a lovely time reading Chapter Two: The ornate & the sumptuous.   It is indeed a surprise to find that Beckett (yes, that Beckett, master of bleak modernism) liked reading Keats.

'I like the crouching brooding quality in Keats — squatting on the moss, crushing a petal, licking his lips & rubbing his hands, "counting the last oozings, hours by hours"... I like that awful sweetness and thick soft damp green richness.' (p.25)

This chapter brings a discussion of Shakespeare and his sonnets, Sonnet 30 in particular.  The one that begins:

when to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past (p.28)

I like what Jackson says about the poem's possibility of finding beauty in sorrow from the beginning, with the phrase 'sessions of sweet silent thought' beautiful in its alliteration and its syncopated rhythm slowing down the pentameter line.  

The beauty of the phrase suggests the lure of the unhappiness that could be never-ending, never cancelled out, if it were not for the happiness the thought of the loved friend brings. (p.29)

Sonnet 30 resonates for me, just as discussed in Chapter One.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/07/01/a...

[k.]

a wonderful book. for me a journey into poetry is a walk down an unbeaten, unruly track. anna jackson was a good guide; though i was frequently lost, i was never unduly strained, and far from injured.
however i did not do the homework provided, hence i shall be reading again immediately with a view to self-conversation and improvement (in that order).
rator: 1

[Joseph Trinidad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it me? Am I drama? I don’t think I’m the drama … May be I am.

[Baxter Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good read. Just the right balance of fun and serious.

[JJ]

i hate poetry

[Gloria Laing · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as an introduction to poetry, and it was a great starting point to this journey. I feel that as a beginner there was only so much I could get out of it, and I plan to read it again once I feel more well-versed in the subject. However, I love reading about people discussing their passions, and Jackson’s excitement about poetry seeps into the pages in a thrilling way.