Caught between the two cities of Hamilton and Wellington, a poet returns to her favourite themes of domestic life, her children and the Russian poet she loves. In the first part of
Catullus for Children , Anna Jackson adapts some of Catullus’s famous verse to the playground, sharply noting the obsessions and the preoccupations of her children in poems with titles like
War
and
Party .
The Treehouse
is a further selection of poems on family life: affectionate, amused and wistful. In
The Happiness of Poets , the Russians talk and sing and play games with words, and finally in
Stow Stay , the family moves south, packs up and gets ready for a new life,
every step an arrival . The poems are full of tenderness and delights in the child’s world, but they also suggest fear and anxiety at its fragility and a knowledge that children soon grow up and take on the burdens of adulthood.