Thicket: paperback

In Anna Jackson’s fifth collection of poetry, a rich and leafy life is closing in on the poet. Scenarios from home and work join fairytale tropes and the interruptions of literature to make a pleasingly patterned whole. Anna Jackson has always been attracted to spending time ‘in a dark wood’ (notably in her 2000 collection, The Long Road to Teatime), and the new book finds her walking there again, revisiting and echoing earlier explorations, but also breaking fruitful new ground. Her shimmering, multi-faceted poems are preoccupied with thickets of language and other tangles; basements and subbasements; lenses, glass sheets and ‘how to see’; and the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘you’. And after the suburban house and its basement, the poet visits the realm of academia, the zoo, a pool hall, and then takes off for sites of folktale, story or dream. Though each poem is satisfying in itself, the links and conversations between them offer other threads into the collection. Thicket is a excellent book from a poet of unease, who constantly turns her attention to the brambled path, the track less followed, the subterranean presences in everyday life.