REVIEWS

SEE BELOW FOR REVIEWS OF:

1. Fontanelle (poetry)

2. The Dispossessed (short fiction)

ALSO SEE BELOW DETALIS OF:

3. Other websites with information about and copies of Andrew’s poetry and fiction

1. Reviews of Fontanelle

“Place and Identity in New Australian Poetry”

by Syd Harrex

But we can at least note in passing that Andrew Lansdown from W.A. continues to enhance his reputation with the beautifully crafted, subtly imagistic poems in Fontanelle, including haikus which indeed justify in “Journey” Lansdown’s homage to Matsuo Basho, ‘my mind his staff,/ my heart his companion’ (92).

Extract from “Place and Identity in New Australian Poetry, 2004-2005”
Westerly, Vol. 50, November 2005

“Poetry Survey”

by Oliver Dennis

“Oh, for a palette to accompany my pen!” This line, from a poem celebrating a blue plastic jug, might serve as an emblem of the Imagist vein in which Andrew Lansdown has written for over twenty-five years. In Fontanelle – his first collection since 1993 – a talent for plain statement and sharp observation remains amply evident, be it in descriptions of flora and fauna (“Sighted from the car – / dandelions crayoning / the roadside yellow”) or personal accounts of pain: “Dear child you died / in the secret safe place / alone. What did you suffer?” (“In Memoriam”). More happily, at the core of the book are twelve poems that trace a son’s successful progress from conception to infancy: “Strange, this seeing / the heart in the head. // Look, a drumming / in the cranium …” he writes in the title poem. Unfortunately, the bulk of these offerings are somewhat limited in scope, so it is a pleasure to come upon a number of good poems about birds, the best of which, “White Ibis” and “Wrens in Wire”, could scarcely be bettered. An active Christian, Lansdown’s governing impulse appears to be to offer praise.

Extract from “Poetry Survey”
Island, No. 101, Winter 2005

Getting Specific

by Jamie Grant

Back in the twentieth century, that distant historic era, when the once much-admired weekly the Bulletin still deigned to employ a poetry editor, a message descended from the heights of the editor-in-chief to the lowly minion who was paid to choose the permitted fourteen-lines-or-less used as a filler between blocks of advertising space. The word was this: no more Andrew Lansdown poems. (That minion, incidentally, was the author of this review.)

It might seem unconscionable that a consistently competent, widely praised and award-winning poet should be banned in such fashion. No other Australian poet kept so consistently to the space restrictions imposed by the Bulletin’s management. Yet, all the same, one can see the chief’s point. To begin with, publication of a Lansdown poem would guarantee that another Lansdown poem would arrive in the mail the next day.

More significantly, though, it has to be admitted that many of Andrew Lansdown’s poems appear at a quick glance to be the same poem. This impression is easily refuted when the poems are read in context, particularly when the context is a collection such as his new book, Fontanelle. The impression of similarity arises from the fact that Lansdown’s main strength as a poet can barely be distinguished from his besetting weakness.

His strength lies in the simplicity and clarity of his writing. A typical Lansdown poem depicts a scene in the plainest possible terms, with a minimum of figurative language and no long or unusual words:

That paddock the farmer is ripping
will soon bristle with seedlings.
Imagine it. Saplings queuing up
on the pasture! Then a forest. Yes.

For many years before the felling,
a forest of blue gums or pines.
This paradox: a forest arising from
a want of timber! In the interim

see how the man with the tractor,
methodical as a child with a crayon,
is drawing thick chocolate lines
on the green sheet of the paddock.

Striking, those dark scribbles,
parallel and contoured to the hill!

The effect of this poem is like that of a landscape painting, and one can gaze into it as at a painting to discover depths and details which at first go unnoticed: the world of the child and the commercial realities of adult life are drawn together in a few lines, as deft as brush-strokes.

Yet there is not an enormous gulf between this beautifully realised poem and one which the Bulletin might think of as a typical Lansdown poem:

Exquisite, these birds of light
on the lake’s smooth surface.

Ibises, herons, spoonbills—
each joined by spindly legs

to a three dimensional replica
rising into the radiant air.

Though this short poem, also, is not without its virtues—there is no fault in it so glaring that a poetry editor could instantly reject it for publication—its plainness is such that some readers might begin to wonder if it should be considered as prose rather than as poetry. The prosaic explicitness of the adjectives exquisite and radiant, where one might expect a poet to evoke those qualities through imagery rather than just stating them, certainly contributes to this impression.

The boundary line between poetry and prose is heavily smudged these days, particularly for a writer like Lansdown who does not make much use of rhyme or metre while also refusing to mystify readers with symbols or metaphors or other cryptic devices. Some poets expect their readers to work hard to discern their meaning; with Lansdown, work is required to detect the quality in his instantly decipherable poems which raises them beyond that blurry border line.

That work is hardly excessive; it need involve no more than a reading of a book like Fontanelle from beginning to end. Lansdown received the John Bray National Poetry Award from the Adelaide Arts Festival for his previous collection, Between Glances, but this new book takes his achievement to a higher level. There are two reasons for this: one lies simply in the inclusion of a number of longer poems.

Lansdown is fond of the haiku as a form, and in this as in each of his previous collections he includes several sequences of three-line miniatures. While his version, in these sequences, of the poetic style labelled “Imagism” is quite adequate, it does not bear comparison with the work of Robert Gray, Australia’s finest exponent of the Japanese technique.

It is in his longer poems that Lansdown’s plain diction can be seen to best advantage, the more so in those poems which also have a strong narrative line. In “Boat”, for example, he describes his fifteen-year-old son taking a small boat out to sea just as a storm approaches, and builds up a real tension in the reader. “Trap”, “Should the Marauders Come”, “Gladdened by Ibises” and “Home”—each of these substantial poems contains rewards for the attentive reader.

Yet the other impressive feature of this new collection is present in several of the shorter poems as well as some of the longer ones; it is what strikes this reader, at least, as an increased attentiveness to specific detail in his poems, most notably in those poems, like the one that gives the book its title, which deal with the birth and early stages of life of the latest of the poet’s children. As the father of several children, he has written about his family before, but seldom with such precision; in his earlier books children are present less for their own sake than for their impact on their father, making the poet himself the most significant figure in those poems. In Fontanelle the child becomes the centre.

By getting more specific, Lansdown has brought a new dimension of sensual intensity to his work, as can be seen in his title poem:

Strange, this seeing
the heart in the head.

Look, a drumming
in the cranium,

a tom-tomming
against the membrane

where the bones are
yet to meet and knit.

May they never
knit entirely, son.

May head and heart
beat in unison

always, as now
in your fontanelle.

No editor could refuse a work as clear and delicate as this. The real reason for the Bulletin’s banishment of Lansdown lies elsewhere in this book: there are a few, less than half a dozen but still enough to be noticeable, poems with an explicit Christian message.

Ironically, in an era which likes to boast of its tolerance, the only religion which intellectuals feel free to discriminate against is the one most Australians have been brought up in. When he is not writing poetry, Lansdown is a minister in the Uniting [sic. Baptist] Church, and it is this occupation which is held against him, secretly, by those who affect to dislike his work on literary grounds.

Review of Fontanelle for JAS Review of Books

by Mark Mahemoff

A leaf on
the doorstep-
don’t even

have to pick
it up to
know the news

Cid Corman

I always thought the word sequester one of the most beautiful in the English language. Now I would have to say that fontanelle is in direct competition. Although I knew the word and its meaning before reviewing this book of poems by Andrew Lansdown, I had never seen it singled out in such a way. To my mind, the main qualitative difference between these two words is that sequester has a particularly masculine cadence whereas fontanelle, apart from its meanings and associations, has a feminine one. Maybe it’s the degree to which a poem grapples with these qualities of language which provides depth and richness.

Masculinity and femininity are threads that run through Lansdown’s poems. There are descriptions of the natural world and relationships between parents/adults and children. As Geoff Page writes in his back cover notes, “Lansdown has a very sincere and direct way of handling poems about his immediate family which subtly suggests great tenderness without becoming sentimental …” I would mostly agree with this assertion. Lansdown does what few contemporary Australian poets are prepared to do. He describes the “gulp in the throat” quality of feeling loved or love for someone or something special. Someone or something that feels miraculous. It is the love expressed in the privacy of one’s own thoughts. Or the darkness of a child’s room at bedtime, before he or she is laid down to sleep, bathed in the glow of a nightlight, when there are coos and kisses and eyes moist with intense feeling.

In ‘Drum’, (p 14) Lansdown captures fragility, a sense of time passing, complexity and simplicity in fourteen words:

Drum

The infant’s
fontanelle:

a small drum
in the skull

that the heart
is pounding.

At one level this is a direct account of the heart’s pulse seen in the still incompletely fused bones of a baby’s skull. At another, Lansdown seems to be saying that it is the heart which does and must rule the head. That each infant will be challenged by life to grow into an adult who marches to the beat of his or her drum.

In ‘Opulence’, (p 28) Lansdown details the intimate scene of parents (he and his partner) and their newborn. He says, ‘My heart aches with love/as a breast with milk’ and cups his hand around his partner’s breast which is recently swollen with milk. Again he uses concision in describing complex feelings, as if verbiage might over explain and dilute the intensity.

Many of the poems are prayers weather [sic] they mention Jesus by name or not (and they often do.) They are also meditations on loss. Consider this one on page seventy-nine:

Rose

The day after I cut it
I notice the white rose
in the pottery vase
on my desk start to wilt

All day it has been
drooping lower and lower,
until now its small head
is hanging upside down,

lolling loose-haired
against the shoulder
of the vase, as if given
entirely to sorrow.

There is a gentle perfection and high degree of restraint in this poem. It asks us to slow down and listen and we do so because the voice we hear has authority. To me this poem exemplifies Lansdown at his best. Simple words and short sentences. Effortless similes that add up to a mood with which one can easily identify.

There are also several long sequences of haiku reminiscent of those found in Robert Grey’s earlier books although arguably lacking Grey’s originality and finish. In ‘Microfilm Dots: 35 Haiku’, here is one of my favourites:

12
Watching fisherman
cast out—an old pelican
with rips in its pouch.

If I have any gripe with this book is that it is too even tempered, too easily satisfied with tranquillity and beauty. While progressing through each poem I yearned for an expletive. A direct rather than hinted at description of sex or violence. Not because this is always necessary but because Lansdown hits so many right notes that eschewing these makes the book feel a little too safe. There seems to me to be coyness around descriptions of birth, a lack of blood, vernix and meconium, which makes some of the poetry feel too scrubbed and wrapped in a blanket.

Apart from this, I enjoyed Fontanelle immensely for its depth, skill and goodwill. I recommend it highly.

Copyright © Mark Mahemoff
Published in JAS Review of Books, Online Issue 44, July 2006
http://www.api-network.com/cgi-bin/reviews/jrbview.cgi?n=1741280745

API Review of Books is an online monthly published by the Australian Public Intellectual Network www.api-network.com and produced by the Australian Research Institute at Curtin University of Technology. Selected reviews from this website are subsequently published in the Journal of Australian Studies.

I Could Teach Bamboo About Emptiness - The Poetry of Andrew Lansdown

[An ABC radio program on the poems of Fontanelle.]

Saturday 4 June 2005

Andrew Lansdown is a Western Australian poet who writes reflective, deeply religious poems about his great loves; nature and his family. A highly awarded poet who is identified with the imagist tradition, he has worked as a teacher, journalist, and Education Officer at Fremantle Prison.

With readings by Murray Dowsett and Kingsley Reeve, and an interview with Andrew Lansdown.

A beautiful, gentle program reflecting the man and his words.

“Fontanelle” by Andrew Lansdown is published by Five Islands Press.

Sound engineer: David LeMay. Producer: Ron Sims

Quoted from the ABC’s website: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/poetica/stories/s1376040.htm

Poetica is a weekly poetry program produced by Mike Ladd and broadcast on ABC Radio National on Saturdays at 3.00 pm and repeated on Thursdays at 9 pm.

2. Reviews of The Dispossessed

Lansdown dialogue turns key

by Shane McCauley

In this new collection of short stories, Andrew Lansdown again shows that he is not only an accomplished poet, but a fine writer of prose as well. The range in tone and subject is considerable. The contemporary and naturalistic easily rub shoulders with the historical and satirical.

Each story has a distinct purpose; not so much “something to say”—rather a skilfully presented packet of observations to share with the reader. The pace is measured and well judged.

The title story successfully reflects many elements to be found in the other pieces. It demonstrates Lansdown’s understanding of the absolute importance of human behaviour at what might be called the micro-level, the outwardly ordinary patterns of domestic and social life.

On the surface, not a great deal happens in this story. The narrator has had a bad day at work and returns home to find things little better there. The children are fighting and the narrator begins to simmer. He is on “the edge of violence”.

He suggests they go to the park for their evening meal and his wife is only too happy to comply. The details of season and street and park are deftly and economically conveyed.

Within a page or two we are at home with the narrator, and the story’s strength lies in the conviction given to his character. He muses on the way adults habitually speak to children. He sees an old Aboriginal woman lying under a tree and has to caution himself “against thinking she was dead”.

Later, the woman’s old partner appears and tries to explain her predicament. The situation—the lostness, the homelessness, the bewilderment—is beyond the narrator’s capacity to change: “He was looking at me intently, as if he wanted me to say something wise or sympathetic. But I didn’t know what to say.”

The story ends with the narrator watching these two discarded people, the dispossessed, stagger off into the gloom. It has the quiet, lucid observational power and restraint of Chekhov. This moving empathy with his characters is also to be found in the longer story, Salt, chronicling the lives of a rural husband and wife. It is a warm and engaging account of the pleasures, challenges and vicissitudes of farming life.

The Lepers, which immediately follows it, couldn’t be more different. It is violent and allegorical, culminating in the horrific stoning to death of those who transgress by entering a city without permission.

Much can be read into this tale of confused and hypocritical morality. Only the hardest of hearts would not share the narrator’s belated identification with the condemned.

Understanding and sensitivity is wittily and mordantly swept aside in Out of Grace. It is a return to domestic observation but of a different and darker nature. Here, with sublime political incorrectness, a father itemises the travails of his family, keeping a tally and itemising all the perceived crimes and misdemeanours committed against himself.

The narrator stews in a spirit of vengefulness: “I nearly tripped on his flamin’ tip-truck again. I’ll know better than to buy him one next Christmas.”

Lansdown’s excellent ear for dialogue is a common feature of these stories. In some, such as The Thing That Amused Them, the story is almost exclusively carried by the conversation. “Like driving in a microwave oven,” says one character recalling a long , arduous journey.

Another delightful aspect of Lansdown’s writing, both prose and poetry, is his serious play with metaphor and hyperbole. Sometimes the metaphor is simply apt, there to help us see or feel as the writer sees or feels: “And mice! Scampering everywhere like tufts of shadow.”

On other occasions it is still appropriate but outrageously so: “Faith Higgins, who walked as if two children were pillow-fighting under her dress …”

Lansdown has a fondness for West Australian landscape and history. Many stories are sprinkled with the names of little far-flung towns. In The New Chum he entertainingly evokes the migrant experience as an old-timer recalls the culture shock of his arrival in 1926. In the sweltering heat of Christmas the Englishman is still thinking of “snow and plum pudding”. The voice, the mind, the writer behind these stories is filled with what amounts to a sense of robust compassion. There is enormous strength in the sensitivity and, above all, humility with which these tales are rendered.

Who else but Lansdown could draw forth, not bathos, but genuine pity when the cows eat a woman’s prized nasturtiums in The Only Things? Anyone who has ever felt vulnerable and sad and yet irrationally hopeful will greatly value the humanity of these stories.

Interview with Andrew about The Dispossessed

In this issue [of IP eNews], Assistant Editor [of Interactive Press] Anne Marshall interviews [one of] our Spring Season authors Andrew Lansdown …

Andrew Lansdown is perhaps best known for his award-winning poetry collections, but he’s also written some fine fiction, including his Highly Commended IP Picks 2005 title The Dispossessed.

MARSHALL: You’re a well-published author in both prose and poetry. Do you find you can work on a poetry manuscript at the same time as a prose manuscript, and can you borrow from each technique or must they remain a separate entity?

LANSDOWN: I usually have a number of writing projects underway at any one time. This is more by necessity than by choice, because new ideas come before old ones are settled.

I do not find it difficult to shift from poetry to prose and back again. In fact, writing in different genres helps to overcome writer’s block. If, on a given day, I lack the impetus and/or insight to work in one genre, I can usually do something in the other.

Of course, poetry and fiction are significantly different from one another in intent and intensity. So there is a sense in which they require separate approaches and remain separate entities. Yet both are writing, after all. So skills developed in one genre are potentially useful in the other.

I think that being a poet has helped me to become a better prose writer. Poetry has instilled in me a love for the English language itself, and I have brought that love to my prose. Language in poetry is often (almost) an end in itself, while in prose it is often (almost) a means to an end. Poetry is sitting in a garden to enjoy the moment, while prose is riding on a train to get somewhere. Thanks to poetry, I find that I want every sentence in a story to be balanced and pleasing to the ear. I want my prose to have some of the qualities of poetry.

MARSHALL: What made you decide to write a collection of short stories about these themes, such as cross-cultural and social interactions and how individuals and family members see one another? Was it from personal experience, or musings of an imagination?

LANSDOWN: I did not decide to write a story collection, as such. Rather, I set out to write this story—then this one. The subject, theme and mood of each story reflect particular interests or preoccupations that I had at the time of writing. When at last I began to gather the stories into a collection, I was surprised and pleased to discover the recurrence of certain concerns.

Some stories sprang from chance ideas, others from fragments of information, and still others from my own experience.

The events described in (the story) “The Dispossessed”, for example, are not far from reality. I did go to the local park with my family and I did encounter and help an Aboriginal couple. When I later reflected on the actual persons and events, I decided to transform them into fiction. And as I worked on the story, a certain mood took hold and a particular theme began to emerge.

Other stories are not so strongly grounded in experience—and some, such as “The Lepers”, are quite outside my experience. But many are a mixture of personal experience and imaginative musings.

MARSHALL: The points of view in these stories change quite rapidly between each one. In some there are third person, others are first person and some are letters. What made you decide to use these narrative points of view and techniques?

LANSDOWN: In literature, how a thing is said is as important as what is said. Indeed, what is said gains (or fails to gain) power on the basis of how it is said. For this reason—along with a sheer love of language—I have always been interested in form and technique.

I like to experiment with different styles. However, it would be wrong to view the stories in The Dispossessed as experimental. The stories do not vary in point-of-view and technique because I wanted to experiment for the sake of it. The variations arise from the demands of the stories themselves. The forms in which they presently exist are the only forms in which I could get them to exist.

Soon after I began writing short stories, I realised that a story can fail simply because the writer has chosen the wrong point-of-view. I originally wrote “The Leper”, for example, in the third person—and the story did not work. But when I changed to the first person, the story came alive.

MARSHALL: When compiling a short story collection, there are often many short stories too choose from. How did you decide on these particular stories, or were they all written with the collection in mind?

LANSDOWN: Although in their collected form some of the stories exhibit certain similarities in theme and tone, none of them were written with the collection in mind. Rather, they were chosen from a pool of about forty stories that I have had published over the years in various literary magazines, newspapers and anthologies.

While sorting through these stories, I came to feel that certain ones were not strong enough to go into the collection. I wanted to include only the best. However, after IP had accepted the collection for publication, IP director/editor David Reiter expressed reservations about several stories.

After reconsidering these in the light of David’s concerns, I decided to withdraw them from the collection. The end result is a shorter but stronger collection.

MARSHALL: Many of the stories are set in rural situations. Do you think the themes of your stories work better in these settings rather than in an urban setting, or are the themes universal, regardless of the setting?

LANSDOWN: I believe the themes are universal, regardless of setting. Yet a particular setting can facilitate the exploration of a particular theme and/or enhance the theme itself.

MARSHALL: Was any research needed for some of the details that are included in your stories, such as salt gathering in “Salt” and wheat harvesting such as “The Story”?

LANSDOWN: The stories set in the early 1900s contain bits and pieces that I gleaned from discussions with elderly people. My grandfather, for example, helped me with the technical information about horse-drawn harvesters in “The Story”.

An elderly farmer in Burracoppin, a town in the eastern wheatbelt of Western Australia, told me about collecting salt for his sheep, and I used that snippet of information to form both the plot and the emotional metaphor of the story “Salt”. Also, on his farm he actually had an old stone well of the sort I describe in the story (although it had never been the scene of the sort of catastrophe that I have imagined). I also thumbed through some archives of the Road Board in the area—and it was in these that I learned about the bounty paid on emus at that time, which also figures in the story. And so on …

Copyright © Andrew Lansdown
This interview was first published in IP eNews, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2005
(ISSN 1442-0023)
http://www.ipoz.biz/News/eNews28.htm#Focus

3. Other websites

with information about and copies of

Andrew’s poetry and fiction

1. The Universtity of Western Australia (Scholars’ Centre) has archived drafts and papers of Andrew’s work. View the “Scholars’ Centre Guide to the Papers of Andrew Lansdown – Scholars’ Centre, University of Western Australia Library – Reference number: MS 108″ at:

http://findaid.library.uwa.edu.au/cgi-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb/findaid/lansdown2/@Generic__BookView;cs=default;ts=default?DwebQuery=Hrtus-Jurina,+Pavol&DwebSearchAll=1

2a. The University of New South Wales (Australian Defence Force Academy Library) has also archived drafts and papers of Andrew’s work. View the “Guide to the Papers of Andrew Lansdown - Australian Defence Force Academy Library - Reference number: MS 74″ at:

http://findaid.library.uwa.edu.au/cgi-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb/findaid/lansdown1/@Generic__BookView;cs=default;ts=default?DwebQuery=Hrtus-Jurina,+Pavol&DwebSearchAll=1

2b. The “Guide to the Papers of Andrew Lansdown - Australian Defence Force Academy Library - Reference number: MS 74″ can also be viewed at:

http://www.lib.adfa.edu.au/speccoll/finding_aids/lansdown_andrew.html

3. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has produced a 40 minute program on the poems of Fontanelle. It is titled “I Could Teach Bamboo About Emptiness - The Poetry of Andrew Lansdown” and was Broadcast Saturday 4th June 2005 on Radio National as one of the weekly Poetica series. View details at:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/poetica/stories/s1376040.htm

4. The First Australian Haiku Anthology website has four of Andrew’s haiku. Go to:

http://www.haikuoz.org/faha/al1.html

and/or

http://users.mullum.com.au/jbird/al1.html

5. The Quadrant magazine website has archived many of Andrew’s poems published in the print magazine since 1998. Go to:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/php/author_letter_list.php?author_id=5

Andrew Lansdown

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