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.’ …

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 Abundance in Christianity & Literature

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. …

CONTINUE READING T.M. MOORE’S REVIEW HERE

Review of Abundance in Studio

.

Andrew’s latest book, Abundance: New and Selected Poems, was reviewed by Ian Keast in Studio magazine, No. 153, 2021. The review begins:

It was 1980. I was in Sydney for a Conference, and browsing in one of my favourite bookshops which carried a substantial collection of poetry. “You must read this. He’s one of your believing lot. It’s a fantastic collection.” The bookshop owner handed me, Counterpoise, by Andrew Lansdown, just published. From conversations over several years, I knew he held views that were somewhere ‘to the left of Lenin’, so his opinion of Lansdown’s book was a real and very generous endorsement. “Read the title poem. That last stanza is such a marvellous statement.”

The title poem of his first major volume of poetry, Counterpoise, (and the first selection in Abundance), provides a good introduction to Lansdown’s work. The poem speaks of light on rivers, jellyfish, children, grandparents, prawning. Simple ordinary things that point to the certainties and strengths in life. The poem concludes,

How ignorant I have been
through these last years of learning,
how weighted down on one side of the scale.
The large, deep things are all
in their own ways dark and hard.
Small things are a counterpoise
to lighten and soften the heart.

‘Counterpoise’—balancing two different realities—is central to Lansdown’s poetry, both in its style and content. He has a simple, ordinary observation, which—in counterpoise—often produces deep insight. His language is clear and precise, in Les Murray’s words, “he is an imagist of almost unlimited inventiveness”. Once evoked, the reader’s imagination and thinking, can—in counterpoise—be extended beyond the poem to explore further the associations raised. It is this counterpoise of being accessible and profound, which provides the essence of Lansdown’s poetry. …

To read the rest of Ian Keast’s review, go to the Reviews page on this website.

To read publication details of Abundance and sample poems, go the Poetry pages on this website here.

Abundance can be purchased with PayPal on the Buy Books page on this website.

Andrew Burke’s new book

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Andrew Burke is an Australian poet whose poetry keeps getting better with the passing years. Some of his poems can be read on this website, and can be read here.

Walleah Press recently released his New and Selected Poems, and it is a fine sampling of his work.

The Biographical Note in the front of the book states:

Andrew Burke is an Australian poet who has lived most of his life in Perth. After his birth in Melbourne in 1944, Burke’s family moved west to expand the family business. In his teens, Burke read ‘Beat’ writers, and they gained his interest more than school work. He published his first short story at 18. He has written on a daily basis ever since—stories, plays, poems, and—to feed family—advertising material and videos. From 1990, Burke taught creative writing and modern literature at universities, TAFE colleges and writing centres. In 2006, he and his wife Jeanette travelled to China where they taught at Shanxi Normal University, Linfen, and, on their return, they taught indigenous children in The Kimberley area of North West Australia. He now dedicates life fulltime to reading and writing.

Here is one of the “new” poems from Andrew Burke’s New and Selected Poems. It typifies the quirkiness and kindliness of much of his work.

 

NOTEBOOK: CAFE POEM

Waitress with
.           .a happy face
delivers a ‘large Cap’
.           .while my head
.                       .is down as
I write in this pad.
“Are you waiting on
.           .anything else?
I look up.
.           .“Just inspiration.”
She takes a step
.           .back and
shakes it all about.
.           .Stops. Shrugs.
“That’s all I’ve got …”

I write her down, inspired

.           .© Andrew Burke

Review of Distillations of Different Lands

Andrews poetry collection, Distillations of Different Lands, was reviewed by Paul Grover in Studio magazine, Number 149, 2020. The review begins:

Andrew Lansdown’s new book of poems is a heartfelt journey into lands beyond and within. This is Andrew’s fifteenth book of poetry. Studio has published four of his poetry books, Abiding Things – poems, stories, essays, Allsorts – poetry tricks and treats and both his stunning Japanese photographs and poetry books. In this new collection the titles of the four parts of the book convey the breadth and depth of these poetic journeys: Heartland, Japan, Homeland, America. The title of the opening poem in Heartland, ‘Sketches of Life’, captures the spirit of this collection, as Andrew explores with raw emotion the playful joy and innocence of young grandchildren, the scraped-back pain from the death of his younger brother, and the depths of intimacy in love, birth and family. …

Continue reading Paul Grover’s review here.