Volume 30, Issue 6 (January 2023) of The Mozzie contains a poem by Andrew. The poem, “After the Fishermen”, consists two tanka. The second, subtitled “Spillage” is reproduced below.
2. Spillage
Pluck a red petal
from a gerbera, string it
with other petals …
Now look at the gills spilling
from the severed salmon head …
© Andrew Lansdown
Three of Andrew’s poems have been published in Studio, Number 153, 2021. The poems are “A Game of Anything”, “Restraint” and “Bamboo Triptych”. The same issue of Studio contained a review by Ian Keast of Andrew’s latest poetry collection, Abundance: New & Selected Poems. (Read the review here.)
Andrew had nine poems in seven issues of The Mozzie in 2022:
Volume 29, Issue 7, January 2022 — “Breakdown”
Volume 29, Issue 10, May 2022 — “Ukrainian Villanelle” (text of poem posted on August 12, 2022)
Volume 30, Issue 1, July 2022 — “She”
Volume 30, Issue 2, August 2022 — “Little Things” and “The Dunking Birds”
Volume 30, Issue 3, August 2022 — “Times of Fox-Dread”
Volume 30, Issue 4, October 2022 — “Petal Poems, Kyoto”
Volume 30, Issue 5, December 2022 — “Ninth Month”
“Ninth Month”, a light-hearted, imagist tanka, is reproduced below:
Ninth Month
A cement mixer—
the shape, of course, but even
the way while sleeping
she would toss about and turn
to keep our child on the churn.© Andrew Lansdown
The October 2022 issue of Quadrant contains two of Andrew’s poems—”Concerning Austerity and Creativity” and “The Daylight Fox”. Each poem is a two-tanka set.
The online journal StylusLit has published Andrew’s poem, “About Emptiness”. Appearing in Issue 12 (September 2022), the poem is a set of three haiku on a common theme.
As stated on the journal’s website, “StylusLit is an Australian, bi-annual online literary journal, which publishes poetry, short stories, creative non-fiction, novel excerpts, interviews and reviews.”
“About Emptiness” is reproduced below. You can also read it on the StylusLit website here.
Perth Poetry Club has invited Andrew to read on Saturday, 1st of September.
Andrew will give two readings: One will feature poetry from his latest book, Abundance: New and Selected Poems; the other will feature the poems of William Hart-Smith.
Perth Poetry Club meets every Saturday at 2.00-4.00 pm at the Moon Café, 325 Williams Street, Northbridge.
If unable to attend Andrew’s reading in person at the Moon Café, you can watch via Zoom. Learn how to connect to the Zoom meeting from the club’s website here.
The Mozzie has published a poem by Andrew in its May 2022 issue (Volume 29, Issue 10). A bitter lament at the plight of the Ukrainians at the hands of the Russians, it is reproduced below:
Ukrainian Villanelle
How we admire them as we watch them die,
the brave beaten unbowed people of Kyiv,
how they lift our spirits and make us sigh.We applaud as they refuse to comply
with the demand that they lie down to live
and we admire them as we watch them die.A kid lifts a Kalashnikov to his eye,
a pensioner arms himself with a shiv—
how they lift our spirits and make us sigh!A husband lingers on a last goodbye
a mother howls a hurt she cannot forgive—
how we admire them as we watch them die.Who’ll answer tyranny, and how and why?
Let them—they’ve valour enough to give.
How they lift our spirits and make us sigh.Cowering behind Covid masks, we cry
with all the pretentiousness of a spiv
how we admire them as we watch them die,
how they lift our spirits and make us sigh!© Andrew Lansdown
Feature image: Homoatrox, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ekstasis magazine has published Andrew’s poem, “Touching the Sacred”, in its Spring 2022 issue. This poem is a set of five haiku located in Kyoto, Japan. (A grouping of haiku on a common subject, theme, mood and/or setting is known as a gunsaku.)
Ekstasis also published a photograph Andrew took in Kyoto of susuki plumes, which corresponds to one of the haiku in the gunsaku.
The fifth and final haiku in “Touching the Sacred” is:
At the fox shrine—
a skulk of yipping windbells
wagging their tails.© Andrew Lansdown
You can read the all five haiku comprising “Touching the Sacred” on the Ekstasis website here: https://www.ekstasismagazine.com/poetry/2022/touching-the-sacred?rq=Andrew%20Lansdown
Last year, Ekstasis published another of Andrew’s poems, “The Biblical Maples”, a set of four tanka, which can be read here: https://www.ekstasismagazine.com/poetry/2021/7/25/the-biblical-maples?rq=Andrew%20Lansdown
Featured image: Susuki plumes, copyright Andrew Lansdown
Christianity & Literature, a quarterly journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press (USA) for The Conferenceon Christianity & Literature, has published a review of Andrew’s latest poetry collection, Abundance: New and Selected Poems (Wipf & Stock/Cascade Books, USA, 2021). Written by T. M. Moore (writer, theologian and Principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe – https://www.ailbe.org/), the review is detailed and positive, and is reproduced on this website by permission of the author.
REVIEW by T. M. MOORE
Abundance: New and Selected Poems. By Andrew Lansdown. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-7252-8457-9. Pp. xvi+225.
I was not familiar with Andrew Lansdown prior to reading this book, but I found his poems to be among the best I have read in many years. His mastery of form, variety of subject, precision of image, insight to everyday things, and buoyancy of hope and faith make reading his poems a delightful, satisfying, and enriching experience. Besides a few new pieces, the poems in Abundance are taken from eleven previous volumes of poetry, dating from 1980. They demonstrate a consistency of style, craftsmanship, lyric, and beauty that are marks of a very fine poet, one American readers and professors of literature would be pleased to know.
Abundance is a song book of wonder and gratitude. Its overarching theme is captured in the closing lines of “Grace”, from Lansdown’s 1993 collection, Between Glances (73):
“Let us give thanks.” And millions
at mealtime do. Even infants,
those most insouciant of souls,
offer thanksgiving with cries and cooing
as they nuzzle at the breast –
that guzzle-and-come-again fount
where form and feast fuse in bliss
and soft blessing. See how they tug
away from the nipple, smiling.Eyes closed and heads bowed: it is
the only way to look up. Thank
You. And think of it, the dignity
we gain through humility. Being
grateful. Giving thanks. That precious
repetitious prayer that makes us remember
grace as we say it.
This is followed on the next page (74) by an even more succinct statement of theme, a poem entitled “Abundance”, which enlarges on the title of this collection:
The thing that astonishes me is that
life goes on abundantly without me…
[Here follow four stanzas, in which he celebrates various of the themes that run through his verse. The poem ends,]
Truly, it’s an astonishment,
this abundance independent of me
that touches me seemingly by accident.
Andrew Lansdown’s poems lead us into the mysteries, wonders, and beauty of creation; the joys, sadnesses, and uncertainties of relationships; the essentiality of family and community; the inevitability of death; and the hope of everlasting life in Christ. His work offers a worldview, by which I mean, a way of viewing the world that enables us to see through the everyday, mundane realities of our uncertain and underappreciated existence into the eternal beauty, glory, safety, and joy of our Creator and Lord. In his book, The Divine Conspiracy, the late Dallas Willard wrote, “By showing to others the presence of the kingdom in the concrete details of our shared existence, we impact the lives and hearts of our hearers, not just their heads. And they won’t have to write it down to hold onto it.”[1] This is what Andrew Lansdown does in abundance through his beautiful poems.
Lansdown writes as a formalist poet, though not slavishly so. He employs traditional forms but also fiddles with them a bit, creates new forms, and uses free verse as he pleases. He has also been greatly influenced by Japanese and Chinese poetry, and this volume reflects his love for those themes and forms as well. …
The February 2022 issue of inScribe: Journal of Creative Writing (Issue 3) contains two of Andrew’s poems—”Night Petals, Shirakawa Canal” and “The Darkness Tanka”.
Night Petals, Shirakawa Canal
Gion, Kyoto, Japan
An oblong of light
laid on the canal surface
from a café window—
and sometimes cherry petals
drifting through from dark to dark …Lovely but lonely
to see them passing by on
the canal’s surface—
petals with their pale faces
like those of the ones we love.© Andrew Lansdown