Anna Jackson
Anna Jackson has published five collections with Auckland University Press, most recently Thicket, which includes ‘Margo, or Margaux’. Anna lives in Island Bay, Wellington, and teaches in the English department at Victoria University.
Jackson comments: ‘I care a lot about punctuation, spelling and fonts but things in the real world don't come much into focus for me so I find fine distinctions about wine, for instance, rather funny. This is mostly what the poem is about, this and the headiness of romance. I particularly liked what Helen Rickerby wrote about the poem when she chose it for a Tuesday Poem blog-post: “It becomes, almost surprisingly, a love poem, but then twists out of that sensuous seriousness, the way someone might awkwardly twist out of an embrace, to talk about what she should name her car.”
‘The poem is not really autobiographical, but I still haven't decided whether to call my own car Margo, or Margaux – I find Margaux a peculiarly pleasing spelling for the name of a car but Margo has the word go in it which seems encouraging for a car. What I didn't know when I wrote the poem was that Margaux Hemingway changed her name to Margaux from… Margot! And the reason was that she learned she had been named after the wine Château Margaux and wanted the spelling to match.’
