Jackson McCarthy is a poet based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He is of mixed Māori, Lebanese, and Pākehā descent. His poetry has been published widely in local literary journals, including Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, and he currently serves as an editor at Symposia Magazine. His debut poetry collection, Portrait, is forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2026.
McCarthy comments: 'These are sort of my "travel poems" but only in the sense that they remember particular places as much as they remember the slant, mood, and haze of travel itself. At the time, I was reading books by Li-Young Lee (very good) and Peter Gizzi (doing well), and I think the seriousness-of-address in my poems as well as the more kind of churchy words ("citizen", "pilgrim", and so on) come from them. I also was listening to Cameron Winter's Heavy Metal, and that line from "Drinking Age" was very much in my mind at the start of the Kawarau song. Oh, and I just adore the second Perfume Genius record ("Sister Song"), along with all the other ones (Glory had just released). I'm extraordinarily grateful to these artists for everything they've done for me. I'm also grateful to my friend Cadence who pointed out the historical resonances in the Arrowtown song: a settlement of Chinese gold miners developed there in the 1880s. I was pleased for that poem to be read in light of those events, but, for what it's worth, I was thinking about getting eaten out. I guess that's what I loved about Li-Young Lee's poems in the first place: that they seem to collapse civic and sexual distinctions, so that the city and its weapons come to stand for erotic exchange, and vice versa. And in these southern places I saw myself.'
Links
Jackson McCarthy's poetry portfolio
Photographer credit: April Brimer