Andrew’s Blurb For Joe Dolce’s Book

Andrew wrote a blurb for the back cover of Joe Dolce’s poetry collection, At the Noisy Cafe: Selected Poems 2017-2023, published by Busybird Publishing. The endorsement, excerpted by Joe from personal correspondence between Andrew and himself, reads:

I have given your poems a careful reading. I think they are among the best you have written. You handle the villanelle deftly, lightly, appealingly. When I read the first one, “The murder of Alberta King”, one that I read some time ago and immediately loved, I thought, what can Joe do to better this? And then I found you bettered it (or at least equalled it) time and again.

Andrew Lansdown, winner of the John Bray Notional Poetry Award, the Joseph Furphy Poetry Award and twice winner of Western Australian Premier’s Book Award.

Andrew’s Blurb For Ron Heard’s Book

Andrew wrote a blurb for the back cover of Ron Heard’s poetry collection (illustrated by Sue Schindler), A Life Deserves Nine Cats, published by Ginninderra Press. The blurb reads:

The first poem I ever published was titled, “I hate cats”. So, if I tell you I love this small collection of cat poems, you may get an inkling of how fine it is. Funny, insightful, moving and subtly crafted, these poems by Ron Heard are a pleasure to read for non-cat lovers: I imagine for cat lovers they might almost be Cat Heaven. — Andrew Lansdown

Andrew’s Blurb For Matthew Pullar’s Book

Andrew wrote a blurb for the back cover of Matthew Pullar’s poetry collection, This Teeming Mess of Glory, published by Resource Publications. The blurb reads:

While reading Matthew Pullar’s poetry, one is struck by its simplicity and directness, prized qualities in any form of communication. His poems are mostly confessional and devotional in nature, and are without pretension or pride. It is refreshing, in an age when the political and the perverse seem to predominate in the arts, to read poems exploring the fundamentals of human existence—family, faith, failure and grace.

Andrew Lansdown, Poet

Andrew’s blurb for Joe Jolce’s book

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew wrote a blurb for the back cover of Joe Dolce’s poetry collection, At the Noisy Cafe: Selected Poems 2017-2023, published by Busybird Publishing. The endorsement, excerpted by Joe from personal correspondence between Andrew and himself, reads:

I have given your poems a careful reading. I think they are among the best you have written. You handle the villanelle deftly, lightly, appealingly. When I read the first one, “The murder of Alberta King”, one that I read some time ago and immediately loved, I thought, what can Joe do to better this? And then I found you bettered it (or at least equalled it) time and again.

Andrew Lansdown, winner of the John Bray Notional Poetry Award, the Joseph Furphy Poetry Award and twice winner of Western Australian Premier’s Book Award.

Review of The Farewell Suites in Studio Magazine

Studio magazine has published a review of Andrew’s book, The Farewell Suites, which was published in the United States by Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf & Stock Publisher, in 2024. Written by the editor of Studio, Paul Grover, the review appears in Number 164, 2025, and begins:

‘Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.’ B. R. Hayden

Within Andrew Lansdown’s new book of poems we discover the power of love intimately connected with the power of death. This very special collection explores the grief, loss and love experienced by the poet as he bears witness to the passing of members of his own family – an older brother at just 21, his two younger brothers, his unborn child, his mother and his father. Each one is given their own suite of poems, reflecting the poet as brother, father and son experiencing the searing pain, the loving forbearance, the anguished farewell and the heartfelt acceptance through this grief and loss. The poem, ‘Knocking’, focuses on the life-changing impact of loved ones:

Knocking

I was eighteen
when my older brother died.
I barely cried, but
from that time on, if not before,
I’ve heard death knocking at my door.

The collection is profoundly personal, intensely honest and richly discerning, speaking to all of us on our own life journey. This comment from the blurb of ‘The Farewell Suites’ invites us to walk with the poet,

‘…These finely crafted poems capture the movements of the heart and are stunning tributes to love, patience, acceptance, and forgiveness. Though focused on the poet’s own loved ones, the poems speak of and to the hearts of all readers, expressing our shared anxieties and sorrows at the passing of those we love. The collection as a whole is deeply comforting, being shot through with both human warmth and heavenly hope.’ …

Two poems in Studio

 

 

Studio magazine has published two of Andrew’s poems in issue Number 164, 2025. This issue of Studio also contains a review of Andrew’s 2024 poetry collection, The Farewell Suites. (See the next post, above, for details of the review by Paul Grover.) The poems, “I Do Not Forget” and “Could Have Been”, are reprinted by permission from The Farewell Suites.

Quadrant publishes Nicholas Hasluck’s launch speech for Andrew latest book

Nicholas Hasluck launched Andrew’s latest collection of poetry, Filling the Emptiness, at the State Reference Library in Perth on Sunday 9 February 2025. Nicholas’ speech was published in the May 2025 issue of Quadrant magazine, and is reproduced in this post.

 

Fresh Light on the Everyday

by Nicholas Hasluck

 

Nicholas Hasluck launched Filling the Emptiness (WA Poets Publishing, Perth, 2025, $25), at the State Library of Western Australia on February 9.

We are here to celebrate the launch of Andrew Lansdown’s latest book of poetry, Filling the Emptiness, from WA Poets Publishing. I have known Andrew as a friend and fellow poet for many years. I am therefore pleased indeed to have been offered the opportunity to launch the book and to say a few words about his work.

The title Filling the Emptiness is intriguing, because Andrew has been so prolific since his first book was published in the 1970s that it might seem to a newcomer to the poetry scene that the emptiness, if any, had been filled already. His book Abundance: New and Selected Poems lists fourteen previous poetry titles plus various works of fiction and non-fiction. But one must never think in numerical terms when approaching the work of a dedicated poet. Like most poets, Andrew is constantly striving to see familiar things in a new light or to reveal connections that aren’t usually perceived. From which it follows that a poet’s cornucopia is constantly changing shape and can never be entirely filled.

This emerges early on in Andrew’s title poem, “Filling the Emptiness”, in which the structure of a bamboo, the external beauty of it, the presence of its inner nodes or compartments, is used to suggest the ever-plentiful nature of the stories, real or imagined, that lie within. His poem, in the Japanese five-line tanka form, is presented to us in short sections, each of which, in a suggestive tone, points to hidden layers of meaning.

……….i

Even a bamboo
can only take emptiness
in little doses …
In the stem the nodes divide
the void into compartments.

……….ii

A white wafer
hidden in the dark hollow
of the bamboo—
a summons to communion
with the one who put it there.

……….iii

Empty lockets
are locked in the bamboo stem
at every node—
saw them free and fill them up
with portraits of ones you love.

I will have more to say in a moment about Andrew’s use of the cryptic Japanese tanka and haiku forms, which he uses to great advantage throughout the book as a means of picturing familiar things in a new way.

Before I do so, let me remind you, as I remind myself, that in a first encounter with a friend’s book one is often drawn immediately to poems touching on shared experiences. Music, for example. Taylor Swift and Beyonce may be names to conjure with in the music world these days but, sotto voce, I have to confess that personally I’m an unreconstructed jazz buff. I treasure vivid memories of visiting Preservation Hall in New Orleans and other iconic venues in Crescent City.

I was therefore drawn immediately to Andrew’s comical poem “Them Shoes” in which he describes raucous party-time revellers in Bourbon Street, New Orleans, beset by trumpet, trombone and tuba, boys tap-dancing for tips, until he is suddenly accosted by yet another denizen of the old French Quarter, a grifter with an alligator grin who points to Andrew’s unremarkable walkers and says: “Where’d you get them shoes?” The poem continues in this way:

Having hooked me, he reels me in with his spiel:
“I could tell you where you got them shoes.”

It’s a lurk, a rort, a trick, but how does it work?
I think of a shoe shop in my far-off homeland.

“Yeah?” I say, knowing he can’t possibly know,
yet knowing, too, he impossibly does. “Where?”

“First,” he says, “you gotta pay for a shine
if I can tell you where you got them shoes.”

“Ten bucks,” he says, when I ask how much.
I agree and ask, grinning, “Tell me where, then?”

He pulls a rag from his pants back pocket
and drops to one knee on the pavement.

Straight-off straight-faced he says: “You got them shoes
on your feet, and your feets on Bourbon Street.”

As he lifts my shod foot onto his knee,
laughter and one-leggedness unsteady me.

Then to the rhythm of his buffing,
in a mix of southern drawl and black jive,

he jibes, “You ain’t payin’ for the shine,
You is payin’ for the education.”

Even the price of the Louisiana Purchase
wouldn’t suffice to pay for my elation!

READ THE REST OF NICHOLAS HASLUCK’S SPEECH HERE.

 

Review of Andrew’s book, The Farewell Suites

Quadrant magazine has published a review of Andrew’s book, The Farewell Suites., which was published in the United States by Wipf & Stock in 2024. Written by academic and editor Jill Ireland and titled “Durable Hope”, the review appears in the March 2025 issue of Quadrant. It opens:

The Farewell Suites treats a series of deaths in Andrew Lansdown’s family: a brother who died young, another who took his own life, a baby who died before birth, and his parents. While death may seem a forbidding topic for a collection of poetry, the poet’s sources of hope emerge as durable despite – or perhaps because of – his honest plumbing of the depths of his family’s experience.

The Farewell Suites has a simple and meaningful structure. Each person lost has their own suite of poems. This helps readers to get their bearings, and sit in silence after each to ponder what has been revealed about the individual who died and how they fit in the jigsaw of the family. The cumulative effect is very powerful.

The length, breadth and depth of the poet’s faith in God permeate every poem but this does not preclude doubt, misunderstanding, even bewilderment at the fact of death and its reverberating impacts. Lansdown’s words illuminate that frozen moment when knowledge of a death arrives and the remainder of life has to be readjusted in a split second, but also in each minute and day that follows, until we deeply recognise how life is without them, and can let go of the “What if…?” questions.

Lansdown is a master of his craft. He is a dedicated and intense observer, seeing the minute and the magnified in the curve of one petal, the corners of a coffin, or a child’s one-word question. He has an uncanny ability to distil the significance of a single moment.

One poem will illustrate how Lansdown captures an everyday occurrence and shows how death jolts it into a deeper meaning, in a moment of stillness and recognition.

Read the entire review on this website here: