A.B. (Andrew Buchanan) Jackson was born in 1965 in Glasgow and raised in the north-west of England. After secondary school in Fife, he studied English Literature at Edinburgh University, where he shared a flat with fellow student Roddy Lumsden. Together they founded and edited the undergraduate poetry magazine Fox and ran the Edinburgh University Poetry Society between 1986 and 1987.
One of the ten poets anthologised in Anvil New Poets 3 (Anvil Press, 2001), A. B. Jackson was singled out by John Greening in Poetry Review for his “demanding and ambitious work: direct, sharp in manner, with an intellectual edge, a valedictory quality.”
His first book, Fire Stations, was published by Anvil Press in 2003 and awarded the Forward Prize for best first collection that year. Marcia Menter reviewed it in The Dark Horse, writing “A.B. Jackson casts a cold eye in his book, Fire Stations, but it’s a cold and glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner’s (though Jackson is only thirty-eight), and when he transfixes you with it, you have to stand there and listen. His unflinching vision of human life is not pretty, but it is beautiful.”
Jackson’s poem ‘Acts’ was awarded 3rd prize in the TLS/Foyles poetry competition 2007. More recently, he retrained in IT and now works in knowledge management and library systems for the NHS in Glasgow. As a web designer, he has created sites for several poets including Gerry Cambridge, Tim Turnbull, and Alexander Hutchison.
“A. B. Jackson has found a new voice for the 21st century. His stark admixtures of the sacred and surreal have the Gothic fascination of gold-inlaid medieval crucifixes. Without being obscure, these poems are harsh, inventive, compassionate, disturbing. A lingering wit and an eye for the sinister keep the reader in suspense.” – Anne Stevenson
Bibliography
Fire Stations, Anvil Press, London 2003
Links
A. B. Jackson's website
Limelight
More poems by A. B. Jackson
The Scottish Poetry Library
“The Chemical Wedding” annotated by the poet
