Andrew’s poem, “Karesansui”, has been published in Hope: Poems from the 2022 ACU Prize for Poetry, selected and edited by Robert H. F. Carver and Margot Hillel.
Administered by the Australian Catholic University, the annual ACU Prize for Poetry is one of the richest poetry prizes in Australia, and the anthology is among the best to be published yearly.
Alas, Andrew’s poem did not win the prize (what were the judges thinking?). Still, it got in the anthology!
The United States magazine, Relief: a journal of arts and faith, has published Andrew’s poem, “The Remarkable Maples, Kyoto”, a set of ten tanka.
All ten tanka are linked by a common subject (maples), a common setting (Kyoto, autumn), a common structure (five lines arranged in 5-7-5-7-7 syllables), a common technique (extended metaphor/conceit and a closing couplet rhyme/half-rhyme), a common tone (light, if occasionally subdued) and a common purpose (surprise and celebration). The final tanka is representative of the other nine:
Winter is too far
advanced to be arrested—
yet many a star
remain pinned to the maples,
the last of autumn’s marshals.
© Andrew Lansdown
The Other Journal, presented twice yearly by the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology in the USA, published one of Andrew’s poems in its Fall 2022 issue (No. 34). The poem, “Restraint”, is reproduced below.
But forget for now the galaxies,
the trillion trillion stars strewn
across space towards infinity—
forget even the orbiting planets
with or without oceans and whales,
volcanoes, dinosaurs and sequoia—
forget for now all that, and think
only of the astonishing power
the Almighty exercised to restrain
his boundless bounding power
for the sake of making something
as delicate as that donkey orchid.
© Andrew Lansdown
March 2023 issue of Quadrant contains five poems by Andrew. They are: “Getting Light”, “Hole”, “Pictures of Plants”, “The Calming Clams”, and “Locations of Red”. “Pictures of Plants” is a gunsaku, a set of six haiku on (as the set title indicates) the subject of plants.
“Holes” was written after a visit to a small graveyard in Kyoto, Japan, where women had left offerings before an idol of Jizo, a Buddhist Bodhisattva to whom women appeal to save their deceased children from a hell-like place called Sai no Kawar. The poem is reproduced below.
Holes
Japan: Jizō Bosatsu, guardian of the souls
of miscarried, aborted and stillborn children (mizuko)A persimmon
left as an offering to
Jizo Bosatsu
has been holed by birds, just like
a mother’s heart, holed by grief.Also without
a centre, a five-yen coin
offered to Jizo
by a mother aching to save
her mizuko from limbo.© Andrew Lansdown
Inscribe: Journal of Creative Writing has published two of Andrew’s poems in its “Birds” issue (No. 5, 2023). Andrew’s poems are “Blessed”, about sparrows sandbathing on the banks of the Kamogawa in Kyoto, and “Zebra Finches, Wangkatjungka”. The latter poem is a set of eight haiku celebrating, as the title indicates, zebra finches in and around an aboriginal community in the north or Western Australia. The first and last haiku are:
Butterfly sprinkler—
beckoning by fluttering
a flock of finches.
The close of day—
only a peg and a finch
left on the line.
© Andrew Lansdown
One of Andrew’s poems has been published in Grieve: Stories and Poems of Grief and Loss, Volume 10, 2022.
The Grieve anthology is published annually by the Hunter Writers Centre (Newcastle, NSW)
Andrew’s poem in the Grieve anthology is “Those Stones”.
Andrew’s poem, “Bats”, is included in Brushstrokes III, an anthology of the best poems entered into the Ros Spencer Poetry Contest in 2022. The anthology is published by WA Poets Publishing, a division of WA Poets Inc, and the poetry selection was mad by Coral Carter.
Studio, No. 156, 2022, contains three of Andrew’s poems—”When They Came”, “Barking Geckos” and “The Bamboo Project”.
The inaugural issue of Seagift 2022 contains two poems by Andrew—”The Homecoming” and “A Game of Anything”.
To quote the magazine Introduction, “Seagift is … a beginning. It is an inaugural collection of poems, non-fiction, and fiction curated by members of the Creative Writing team at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education.” The members of the curating/editorial team are: Melinda Tognini, T. C. Shelley and Miriam Wei Wei Lo.
Although Andrew was/is not part of the editorial team, he is an adjunct lecturer in Creative Writing at Sheridan Institute.
The text of Andrew’s poem, “A Game of Anything”, is reproduced below:
A Game of Anything
I am watching two little girls
like ducklings totteringin line behind their mother—
only, they are making a gameof the going, taking care
with wing-flappings for balanceto keep in the lanky shadow
she is casting on the asphaltas she trundles her trolly
in the late afternoon sunlightthrough the shopping-centre carpark.
© Andrew Lansdown
Two of Andrew’s Poems—”Kimberly Hand” and “Meditations On Impermanence”—have been published in inScribe: Journal of Creative Writing, No. 4, August 2022.
“Meditations On Impermanence” is a set of four tanka. “Kimberly Hand”, reproduced below, consists of two stanzas, each with a syllabic structure like a tanka.
Kimberley Hand
Stencilled on stone
in spattered orange ochre—
a hand that once held
a flint knife and a fire stick,
a war club and a child’s hand.It was, I suppose,
a hunter’s hand, this outline
in ochre spatter:
I suppose, too, none can tell
if he meant to wave farewell.© Andrew Lansdown