New Zealand poet Michael Jackson (b.1940) has spent most of his life as a professional anthropologist, and currently holds a distinguished Chair at Harvard. The author of thirty-five books, including eight volumes of poetry, and winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, Jackson has been described by Martin Edmond as one of our most astute, humane, idiosyncratic, neglected and perdurable writers. His poetry is characterized by its cosmopolitan range, its conceptual depth, lyrical concision, and craftsmanship. Jackson writes, "I have always felt the need to refer my poems, as Basho does, to a place, time or event that brought it into being; to acknowledge that poems are not just texts, but have contexts. Poems are like windows that give us a glimpse of a world we travel through all too quickly. I think of Colin McCahon's Northland Panels; the paintings stop you in your tracks, each onetranscending time and circumstance while firmly rooted in mundane realities."
