“As has been demonstrated in his earlier collections of verse, the West Australian poet Andrew Lansdown is an imagist of almost unlimited inventiveness. His observant eye can graze, can focus on the tiniest quiddity and make it perpetual, or it can feast on a subject and draw out an inexhaustible wealth of comparison. This new collection shows that his ear is equally acute, attuned to the stretchy voice of a gibbon in the zoo, or to the speech of crabs. Unobtrusively, he is also a master of movement, catching the fine motion of life in supple reflexes of words, and his whole work is informed by a moral integrity which proves, on attentive reading, to be its very spine.
“There is in this collection a deep sense of gladness. But there is also grief and yearning, as in the poems ‘The Horseshoe Shooter’ and ‘Far From Home, the Blower’. Through their diversity of form and feeling, these poems powerfully communicate the many concerns of this poet.
“Waking and Always has a strong delicacy about it … Lansdown is a master of the shortish poem of keen observation and succinct evocation.”
— Les Murray
“I admire greatly the way in which his world is full of the beauty, intensity and wonder of natural significances: birds, trees, colours, sounds, their permutations and human import. Such things are a touch of the eternal we can all experience.”
— Rod Moran, The Australian Teacher
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