WA Poets Publishing released a new collection of Andrew’s poetry in February 2025. Titled Filling the Emptiness, the book contains 90 poems on varying subject and in varying forms. The book also contains a six-page Introduction written by Andrew.
You can read more details about Filling the Emptiness, and four sample poems, on this website here.
Copies of Filling the Emptiness can be purchase through the BUY BOOKS page on this website for $25.oo, postage included.
Andrew has had ten poems published in six issues of The Mozzie from June 2023 to February 2024:
Volume 31, Issue 5, February 2024 – one poem: “Increments of Beauty”
Volume 31, Issue 4, December 2023 – two poems: “A Not-So-Nonsense Poem” and “Preventive Measures”
Volume 31, Issue 3, October 2023 – two poems: “Concerning Austerity and Creativity” (consisting of two tanka, “1. Inspirations for Ikebana” and “2. Ikebana Dreaming”) and “Violets” (consisting of three haiku)
Volume 31, Issue 2, August 2023 – three poems: “Locations of Red”, “Aboriginal Rock Art” and “Sculptors”
Volume 31, Issue 1, July 2023 – one poem: “Starlight” (four haiku)
Volume 30, Issue 9, October 2023 – one poem: “Zuiho-in Zen Temple, Kyoto”
The current issue of Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal (Issue 34, 2023) contains a poem, a tanka, by Andrew. It is reproduced (in the journal’s style, without title or capitals) below.
how, I wonder,
how can it keep holding on—
the small spider
splayed in thin rigging between
the reeds the wind is shaking?© Andrew Lansdown
The May 2023 issue of The Mozzie contains a set a set of four tanka under the common title, “Found Art”. The first tanka in the set, “The Painterly Bird”, is reproduced below.
The Painterly Bird
A blackbird roosting
on a branch overarching
a lush violet patch
dollops some oily white paint
onto a small green palette.© Andrew Lansdown
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!
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
The American literary journal, Antipodes, has published one of Andrew’s poems. “Light Observations”, a set of eight light-hearted haiku, appears in Vol. 34, No. 2, December 2020 issue of Antipodes. The middle two haiku are:
……….iv
The ram paddock—
a gathering of Scotsmen,
sporrans swinging.
……….v
Glorious racket—
one million frogs hollering
or one megafrog?
© Andrew Lansdown
The Canberra Times newspaper published one of Andrew’s poems, “The Dunking Birds”, on 5th February 2022.
Andrew’s shortlisted book, Abundance: New and Selected Poems, did not win the 2021 Australian Christian Book of the Year Award. What were the judges thinking!
But seriously, congratulations to Stephen McAlpine for winning the Award with his book, Being the Bad Guys.
Interestingly, of the ten books shortlisted for the Australian Christian Book of the Year Award, Andrew’s Abundance was the only poetry collection. The other nine books were all non-fiction works of a theological, apologetic, pastoral or biographical nature. With such a wide variety of genres in the one award, the judges’ task of selecting a winner must have been very difficult.
Concerning Abundance, the Award judges said:
“Andrew Lansdown has spent a lifetime observing, recording, honing and perfecting his art. This collection displays a masterful poet of form and image at home among his family, kingfishers, grasshoppers, puddles and his Lord and Saviour. Play and discipline. Joy and melancholy. Abundance is exquisite, delightful and always powerful.”
Read more about Abundance on this website here. Abundance can be purchased from Koorong Books or through this website, here.
Rochford Street Review has published four of Andrew’s poem in its latest issue, Issue 31, 2021:1.
The poems are: “Little Things” (a set of 8 haiku); “After the Fishermen” (a set of 2 tanka); “Times of Fox-Dread” (a suite of 4 tanka); and “Petal Poems, Kyoto” (a 3-tanka suite).
The first haiku in “Little Things” is:
A flustering moth
on the lighted windowsill
in a gecko’s mouth.
. .© Andrew Lansdown
The 4 tanka in “Times of Fox-Dread” were written after a visit to Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto. The first tanka in the set is titled “Possession” and reads:
In old Japan
fear of foxes polluted
everyday life:
Oh, is that maid a vixen?
Is that sickness possession?
. .© Andrew Lansdown
You can read the poems in full on the Rochford Street Review website here.