12 Poems in The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010

The esteemed Australian poet and anthologist Les Murray has compiled a collection of the best poems published in Quadrant magazine in the last ten years.

Les Murray has included 12 of Andrew’s poems in the anthology, which is titled The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001 – 2010 (ISBN 9780980677867).

“It has been known for decades”, Les Murray writes in his introduction to this collection, “that poets who might fear relegation or professional sabotage from the critical consensus of our culture have a welcome and a refuge in Quadrant—but only if they write well.”

From the second decade of his twenty years as literary editor of Quadrant, Les Murray here presents a selection of the best verse he published between 2001 and 2010.

It is a prodigious body of work: 487 poems by 169 authors.

These days, Murray observes, when poetic values are increasingly being seen as real enrichment, readers are turning to the few journals that nurture them:

“At a time of such turn-about in the life of magazines, a Quadrant anthology seems well overdue.”

Andrew’s poems in The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010 are: “Two Pictures of Hurt”, “After Pain”, “Dandelion Haiku”, “Distress”, “Wrens in Wire”, “Freedom”, “The Sleep of the Upright”, “Caress”, “Hop”, “Flag”, “Sighting”, “After Death”.

The poem “Freedom”, which is also published in Andrew’s latest collection, The Colour of Life (in Two Poets with Kevin Gillam, Fremantle Press 2011) is reproduced below:

Freedom

.

How foolishly I once thought of freedom.

.

When my first son was small I sometimes

dreamed of the day I’d be independent

.

of his demands. At times the chores

of fatherhood hung upon me like chains.

.

Now he is gone, gone to university, gone

from home—and I am enslaved by loss.

.

How foolishly I once thought of freedom.

.

© Andrew Lansdown