Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson (born 1940 in Nelson, New Zealand) is a poet, anthropologist, and academic.

Education

Jackson studied at Victoria University of Wellington, Auckland University, and Cambridge University. He lectured at Massey University, the Australian National University, and Indiana University.

Career

He has conducted fieldwork, which includes living with the Kuranko people in Sierra Leone through the 1970s and in 1985, with the Warlpiri of Australia’s Northern Territory between 1989 and 1991, and with the Kuku Yalangi of Cape York Peninsula in 1993 and 1994.^[1]

His work has appeared in Poetry NZ.^[2] In 2006, one critic wrote: "Michael Jackson’s latest collection of poetry is titled Dead Reckoning, a navigator’s term for estimating one’s location based upon extrapolations of distance and direction from one’s last-known position. The eponymous poem cements the metaphor’s connection to personal identity..."^[3]

Works

Anthropological books

• Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives (1982)
• Barawa, and The Ways Birds Fly in the Sky (1986)
• Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (1989)
• At Home in the World (1995)

Poetry

• Latitudes of Exile (1976)
• Wall (1980)
• Going On (1985)
• Duty Free: Selected Poems 1965–1988 (1989)
• Antipodes (1996)
• Dead Reckoning

Fiction

• Rainshadow (1988)
• Pieces of Music (1994)

Awards

• 1981 New Zealand Book Award for Poetry
• 1983 Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship
• 1995 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry

References

External links

• "Michael Jackson", New Zealand Literature File, University of Auckland