THE USK woman whose death is at the centre of a murder investigation is tonight named by police as Anne Jackson, who wrote under the name Anne Cluysenaar.

Mrs Jackson, 78, a respected poet, who lived at Little Wentwood Farm with husband Walt, was found dead on Saturday.

A 48-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of her murder. He remains in police custody.

The poet was born in Belgium in 1936 to Belgian-Scottish artist John Cluysenaar and the painter Sybil Fitzgerald Hewat.

Her family fled Belgium for Britain when she was three just before the outbreak of World War II.

They came to Somerset but moved regularly before relocating to Ireland when Mrs Jackson was 14.

She began writing poetry as an eight-year-old and excelled as a student, gaining a double first in English and French literature in 1967 at Trinty College, Dublin and later, a diploma in general linguistics at Edinburgh University.

She started teaching as an English lecturer at Manchester University in 1957 and went on to teach linguistics, stylistics (studying syntax, grammar and vocabulary in a text) English and American literature and creative writing.

She was passionate about communicating with an audience and a readership and successfully combined the solitary life of a poet with the public life of a teacher. She moved to a small-holding in Llantrisant near Usk, over 25 years ago with her husband Walt.

She came out of retirement in the late 1990’s and went to Cardiff University where she taught for six years on the creative writing BA and MA courses, which she helped establish.

Her work has appeared in many anthologies including Faber’s Poetry Introduction Four in 1978. In 2005 she won a writers’ bursary from Yr Academi to produce poems on Wales’s geology and palaentology.

She published a collection of poems exploring the life and work of naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace from Llanbadoc who discovered natural selection at the same time as Darwin, the first of which appeared in 1967 and the most recently, Batu –Angas: Envisioning Nature with Alfred Russel Wallace, in 2008.

Her work has been published in magazines and anthologies and founded two literary journals: Shead and Scintilla, published by the Usk Valley Vaughan Association.

In 2000 she wrote The Echoes in Stone text for the Tintern Abbey son-et-lumiere, which was repeated two years later and the Footsteps on the Sands of Time text for a similar event at Caldicot Castle two years after that. She also took part in the Through the Arch regeneration scheme completed in Chepstow in March 2005 whereby some of her lines and those produced at her poetry workshops for children, were featured on paving in the town.

Her most recent collection of poems; entitled ‘Touching Distances; Diary Poems’, were written between 2010 and 2012.