Terrier, Worrier: A poem in Five Parts by Anna Jackson

Anna Jackson has an impressive catalogue of writing specialities. Poet of several wonderful collections, writer of a novella (The Bed Making Competition), scholarly publications and most recently a wonderful guide Actions & Travels about how poetry works. A fascinating study for anyone who loves poetry and wants to know more. Now we have something different again, the collision of poetry and thought. An autobiography of thought, through poetry and with the occasional reference to urban chickens.

The five parts follow the seasons, beginning in summer and coming back around to it once more for a second look. We begin by considering thoughts, or to be more exact, when you are thinking and when you are not. Jackson describes In My Mind’s Eye by Jan Morris, her thought diary when she recorded a thought a day, ending after 188 days. On day 87, she didn’t have a thought.

There is a lot going on in Terrier, Worrier, certainly much more than meets the eye at first glance. Other writers are frequently referenced, and the eight pages of notes at the end of the book not only show us some of the thinking process involved but add wonderful little asides to our understanding. For example, we learn that Virginia Woolf missed 11 days of diary writing in February 1919, saying, ‘What a disgraceful lapse! Nothing added to my disquisition, & life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Eleven days unrecorded.’ Jackson makes this observation: ‘I wrote about Virginia Woolf’s diary in my book Diary Poetics (Routledge, 2009). I used to write a diary myself, in my twenties, until I started writing about diaries instead, and stopped keeping my own.’

Apart from Morris and Woolf, others mentioned in the notes include Madison Hamill and her wonderful essay collection Specimen, Wittgenstein, Oliver Sacks, Olivia Laing, and a host of other writers, articles and poems.

Terrier, Worrier is an exploration of thought. Of the thoughts you think, or perhaps those that Anna Jackson thinks. The ideas, the thoughts, come jumbling out in a stream that can sometimes be hard to follow. But I am not sure we are supposed to follow, more that we should listen for a while, dip our toes, and learn somethings or experience some thoughts of our own which we would not have done otherwise. Early in the first instance of summer we listen to the following:

Perhaps an animal is a person who doesn’t have thoughts

that can be put into words, a person who only has sensations,

experiences, memories, anticipations, emotions and instincts.

Here are two short paragraphs that follow each other, as an illustration of where things can start and where they can go:

‘Thought stalls on an event it cannot bear to contemplate, can

go no further’, Jaqueline Rose wrote in her book On Not Being

Able to Sleep. ‘The task of psychoanalysis is not so much to undo

forgetting, but to put poetry back into the mind.’ She could

have said the same about the task of dreaming, psychoanalysis

without the analysis.

I thought, perhaps it isn’t that people high on mushrooms are

accessing some transcendent truth through the unlocking of

their own minds, perhaps it is that they are experiencing life the

way fungi experience it, with a consciousness without individual

identity, dispersed and without borders.

In the second series under the heading of Summer, there are some observations on falconry and the need to keep the bird close to the body of the falconer. That advice is followed by this paragraph:

It was thought of songbirds that only the male birds sang.

But when female scientists started looking, they found female

songbirds in one species after another. It turned out that

the dominance of male songbirds is only true in the northern

hemisphere, where Darwin and other early ornithologists

were from, and for a century, no one questioned the belief

only male birds sang.

Sometimes Jackson’s observations are broad or philosophical. At other times they are simple and more mundane, for example:

Lying on the carpet in our living room, Simon cooking in the

other room, I had the most profound sense of contentment.

I realised I was in the position I spent much of my childhood

in, lying on a carpet, able to play the most complicated

imaginary games in front of everyone, with whatever props

were to hand, knowing that even with the outer workings of

my inner life on display I was completely private because no

one was remotely interested.

The whole experience of Terrier, Worrier is of having a conversation with a good friend. A wide-ranging conversation, but one, because you know each other so well, that doesn’t actually have to make sense. You can talk about anything, or everything. In this way the collection is a little disconcerting – because Anna isn’t your good friend and you don’t really know her at all, but she is opening herself up to our scrutiny. The first-person narrator is very much the poet opening herself and her thoughts to us for examination.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Auckland University Press