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: