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Fremantle Press (Fremantle, WA), 2011

228 pages

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ISBN 9781921696602

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Two Poets contains exciting new collections by leading Western Australian poets Andrew Lansdown and Kevin Gillam, with an introduction by poet and critic Lisa Gorton. Both Lansdown and Gillam have distinctive voices but share a strong sense of place, and concern with craft. In her introduction, poet and critic Lisa Gorton describes their approaches to style:

‘Over nearly forty years, Lansdown has worked at [the] art of precision … these poems show how an aesthetic of exact detail and subtle craft has shaped his poetic idiom - has become the very language of his craft.’

‘Gillam’s poems set him in the midst of time, in the present participle, and in the frame … his poems attend not to the still moment, but to the haphazard and open-ended experience of time … Gillam’s is a various and wide-ranging art.’

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Note:

Two Poets contains two collections of poetry:

The Colour of Life by Andrew Lansdown

and Songs Sul G by Kevin Gillam

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Interview with Andrew Lansdown concerning The Colour of Life in Two Poets

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Naama Amram of Fremantle Press interviews Andrew Lansdown concerning his forthcoming collection, The Colour of Life, in the book Two Poets – June 2011.

Naama Amram: Your collection in this book is called The Colour of Life. Can you tell us about the significance of this title?

Andrew Lansdown: The title has, to my mind, two implications, or applications.

Generally, the colour of life is the range of moods and emotions arising from the range of situations and perceptions depicted in the poems in my collection.

Specifically, the colour of life is the sense of aloneness and longing that surprises us, ambushes us, repeatedly throughout life. It is a form of grief—grief felt, often, without evident cause. It is not a denial of the loveliness and happiness of life, but an underlying sense that something is missing and/or amiss.

Well, so much for attempts at definitions! In the end, the colour of life can only be truly expressed in poetry or prayer. I have attempted to capture and convey it in poems such as ‘Happiness’, ‘Human’, ‘Me’ and ‘The Colour of Life’.

Naama: You often work in the Japanese forms of haiku and tanka. Why?

Andrew: I work in whatever poetic form will yield at the time of working. Often I do not know what form a poem will take when I begin writing it. The appropriate form becomes clear only as the poem progresses.

As evidenced in The Colour of Life, I work in rhyming couplets (eg, ‘Prayer Against Pain’), rhyming quatrains (eg, ‘Train to Wyong’), free verse (eg, ‘The Nemesia’ and ‘Boat’), unique syllabic structures (eg, ‘Menace’, with 8 couplets of 6- and 10-syllable lines, or ‘End of Day’, with 10 tercets of 7-, 5- and 7-syllable lines), sestina (eg, ‘Sestina on a Journey’), choka (eg, ‘Renewal’), and villanelle (eg, ‘Prayer’). However, the forms most represented in The Colour of Life are haiku and tanka.

I have found over the years—and increasingly in recent years—that haiku and tanka often suit my poetic purposes. I love the compactness and balance of both these traditional Japanese forms. And I love the discipline of writing in objective forms that compel and enable me to distil setting/subject/theme/mood in just 17 or 31 syllables.

I have also found it rewarding to group haiku together under a common heading. Such groupings are called ‘gunsaku’. The haiku in a gunsaku have a common setting or subject or theme or mood, and yet they do not build on each other, like the stanzas of an English poem or the interdependent poems in a sequence. The haiku in a gunsaku are autonomous poems, poems in their own right: but gathered together they enrich each other and create an impression that is greater than they would/could achieve individually. (Tanka can also be gathered into gunsaku, although The Colour of Life does not contain any of these.)

Naama: You have been publishing poetry for nearly four decades. What inspired you to write then? Has that changed, and if so, what inspires you today?

Andrew: I was inspired to write at the age of sixteen when I heard a boy my own age read a poem he had written. I was astonished that someone like me could do such a thing and I desired to be able to do it, too.

Also, at the time, I was listening to traditional and contemporary folk music by artists such as James Taylor, Donovan Leitch, Melanie Safka, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Steeleye Span. This type of music, of course, places great importance on the lyrics. I think this influenced me, too.

What inspires me to write poetry today is the sheer love of poetry. I love reading it. I love writing it. I find it to be the perfect literary form for the expression of grief and joy and every emotion in between.

Naama: What is your writing space like? And how would you describe your writing habits?

Andrew: My writing habits are not as strict as I would like them to be. So many other things in life push in and push poetry out.

I write mostly in my study, at my writing desk, in front of a large window that lets me see a birdbath, arrow bamboo, and an almond tree. Although I try to write every day, I do not always write poetry. Stories, novels and essays also have a claim on me.

Naama: Poet and critic Lisa Gorton notes that both you and Kevin ‘treat poetry as a work of intimacy, not performance.’ In the process of writing this book, have you learned anything from Kevin’s work?

Andrew: Kevin and I were not involved with each other when we wrote our poems and compiled our collections. It was, happily, Fremantle Press’s initiative to place our collections together under the Two Poets cover.

I am very pleased to share a book with Kevin. As readers will discover, Kevin and I write very different sorts of poetry. Yet I think our collections compliment each other precisely because they are so different in style and sentiment.

As for learning from Kevin: I cannot point to anything specific. However, I am convinced that reading good poetry contributes to one’s understanding of poetry, which in turn contributes to one’s ability to write it. On that score, I presume Kevin’s poetry has influence me in subtle, if indefinable, ways.

I think Lisa Gorton is right to say that both Kevin and I ‘treat poetry as a work of intimacy, not performance.’ Implicit in her words are several truths about both of us as poets: we write with sincerity; we do not write to show off; and we write with craftsmanship and rigour.

Naama: What is the greatest challenge that poetry presents to you, and how do you overcome it?

Andrew: My greatest challenge in writing poetry is overcoming the feeling, as I face a blank page, and as I begin to toy with images and ideas, that I can’t possibly write another poem. At the start I feel I can’t do it; and at the end I feel I can’t do it again. I overcome this by persevering with the poem at hand—and by remembering that I have had these feelings many times before and many times before they have proven wrong.

Naama: What writing projects are you currently working on?

Andrew: I am working on another collection of poetry, provisionally titled Gestures of Love. It will consist of poems written solely in the traditional Japanese forms of choka, tank, haiku and gunsaku (haiku or tanka groupings).

Copyright © Andrew Lansdown

An edited version of this interview, combined with an interview with Kevin Gillam, can be read on the Fremantle Press blogspot here and on the Fremantle Press Facebook site here.

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