Edward Jenner (writer)


Edward Jenner, is a New Zealand born poet, translator, teacher and researcher of Ancient Greek texts. He has lived in New Zealand and overseas teaching Classics and producing poems, translations, and scholarly articles. His poetry and research have been reviewed and remarked upon.
"Complete Gold Leaves", being his translations and the original Greek texts of Ancient Greek lamellae with messages on the afterlife for adherents of some unknown cult, appeared in 2016 in the magazine Percutio 2016. Gold Leaves, outlines the state of research into the same and contains all of his translations of these texts.
After publishing two short volumes of poetry in 1980 and 1991, Jenner published "Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna" in 2009. Based on this work, the writer Jack Ross has discussed Jenner's 'postmodern classicism' and his attention to landscapes, 'above all those of Africa' along with his 'devotion to the particularities of memory'.
Poet Michael Harlow referred to subjects such as 'certitude, the insistently rational and dogmatic... and the posturing of much prevailing literary narcissism' as being 'challenged and unmasked' in ''Writers in Residence".
His latest book "The Arrow that Missed" has been reviewed in Landfall 234 by Johanna Emeney and in Poetry New Zealand Yearbook No.52 2018 by Jack Ross. The former calls attention to his evocations of landscape and the latter to his 'examination of "cracks in the edifice", the things we can never know, can never reconcile with one another'. But perhaps the most comprehensive review of this volume is that by Richard von Sturmer who examines the prose poem in general and the possibilities 'offered by fragmentation'.

Works