Filling the Emptiness

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

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!

I am reminded by this picture of the rough and ready jazz scene that another poet well known to us all, Philip Larkin, was a jazz buff. This emerges from his poem about the great trad jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet, in which the poet says, “That note you can hold, narrowing and rising, shakes like New Orleans reflected in the water … Oh, play that thing … On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes. My Crescent City is where your speech alone is understood.”

This brief digression brings me back to my earlier remarks about seeing familiar things in a new light and the way in which short but cryptic forms of verse, and graphic images, as in Andrew’s bamboo poem, can be used to evoke layers of meaning and veiled connections which aren’t immediately obvious.

In a short poem called “Days”, Larkin put the question: “Where can we live but days?” He then says: “Ah, solving that question / brings the priest and the doctor / in their long coats / running over the fields.”

With a few brief words and the use of a graphic image, the notion of simply living in the mundane workaday realities of daily life is suddenly transformed, as the poet links the scene to intimations of mortality and the presence of crucial concerns, including medical needs and religious faith.

I can’t pretend to be well-versed in the Japanese forms of five-line tanka or three-line haiku that Andrew uses to such advantage throughout the book. He touches on their provenance in his introduction. Speaking for myself, and bearing in mind that poems do not always assert what they mean—because, as one poet put it, they should simply be—I greatly appreciate the way in which, so often, with a few short words and the use of graphic images, Andrew’s poems become an intriguing distillation of what he sees in the world around him, presenting, simultaneously, both the nature of the tangible object or event before him and the haunting feeling that what is being described brings with it an insight into other vistas.

Ezra Pound, one of the early Imagist poets, described the process in this way: “One is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself or darts into a thing inward and subjective.” In other words, the visual image sparks a thought, the thought becomes a personal rumination, a link that speaks not only to the poet but also to like-minded observers. To my mind, there is something of this in a section of Andrew’s poem “Kansai Blossoms”:

They should be sinking,
petals sailing pond and sky,
they should be sinking
with the load placed on them by
poets, priests and samurai.

Another example of a deeper meaning to be discovered in a tangible presence, pond or petal as the case may be, can be glimpsed in Andrew’s poem “Of Bells and Bodies”:

If they are beaten,
whether by clapper or pole,
bullet or bludgeon …
a bell will release its toll,
a body will loose its soul. 

In this case, we are drawn not only beyond the perception of a tangible object or event to the more ephemeral notion of a bell used in a ritual manner but also, for some readers, even further afield: to an echo of the haunting lines, although in prose, penned by the Anglican priest-poet John Donne, in which, having reminded us that “no man is an island”, he went on to caution his audience: “Do not send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

This brings me, in closing, to another central facet of Andrew’s work. He is deeply committed to the Christian faith, although, as he makes clear in the introduction, his poems do not directly address such matters and none require the reader to endorse a Christian worldview. His poems simply express a shared humanity and thus, not surprisingly, many of them are inspired by family values and affection, although he is well aware of the need to avoid sentimentality.

In a chaotic and increasingly secular modern world in which religious faith is constantly changing shape, contested in some quarters, in decline in others, a stance of this kind is problematic. To be persuasive and to secure an audience, poets influenced by their faith are obliged to speak obliquely or in a veiled fashion, as one finds in the works of another poet influenced by his faith, T.S. Eliot, whose widely-admired poems The Waste Land and Four Quartets are infused with allusions and veiled insights in the course of showing familiar things in a new and at times a disturbing light.

The same might be said of Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going” in which, in the course of a random visit to a deserted church, the poet draws upon the stillness of the scene, the presence of empty pews and antique emblems, to indicate the decline of what was once a revered centre of communal values, a poignant but insightful way of looking at familiar things.

Andrew’s stance, as he describes it in the introduction, his intention not to preach, but, rather, to reveal layers of meaning in a contemporary tone, is skilfully accomplished. It strikes me, as I ponder the nature of his achievement, that the short but suggestive forms of verse he employs prove useful as to this aspect of his work also. A few words, the creation of a graphic picture, with much more then suggested by the use of veiled language and allusions. We are reminded that a poem need not assert what it means. It should simply be.

With this in mind, let me turn to some lines in his poem “Walking without Light”:

We step out into darkness, setting off
for our hut. The clouds have tucked
the stars away for the night.
Without windows to the south paddock,
the farmhouse is black behind us.

We step out into darkness. We never
thought to leave a lantern burning
to guide us home …

We tread on and on, and at last
we ask one another what we have been
asking our hearts: How could it be
this far? How could we be lost
when we know the way so well?

Towards the end of the book, one finds a poem inspired by a visit to Hozen Temple at Osaka, “Worship with Water”. The poem opens in this way:

In the temple yard
an old man handpumps water
from a covered well
first for his own ablutions
then for the god’s libations.

I could point to many other examples of the way in which Andrew uses the short forms centred on a graphic image to set in motion a chain of reflections, but time is against me, and in any event a picture of cleansing libations seems a good note to end on.

This is a beautifully-presented book. The layout, design and dust jacket, with a front cover featuring one of Andrew’s photos from Japan, are all perfectly suited to the verse within. And as to the quality of the verse, this is a book to be treasured by readers and fellow poets, all those who appreciate a skilful use of language, including, where necessary, the virtues of precision and restraint. With this in mind, and without further ado, let me now launch the book: a fine addition to Andrew’s extensive body of work.

Copyright © Nicholas Hasluck
Launching speech for Filling the Emptiness at the State Reference Library in Perth, Western Australia, on Sunday 9 February 2025.
Quadrant, May 2025