Three poems and an essay in Quadrant
The January-February 2026 issue of Quadrant magazine contains three poems and an essay by Andrew.
The poems are: “The Tombstone Trail”, “Psalm of Importunity” and “Ringing”.
The first poem (written in rhyming couplets) and the second (written in free verse) concern the decline and death of Andrew’s elderly father, and are also published in Andrew’s recent poetry collection The Farewell Suites, published in the United States by Cascade Books (book details here and purchase option here).
The third poem, “Ringing” (written in three, haiku-like stanzas), concerns the misery of tinnitus, and begins:
Indescribable,
this ringing that to others
is inaudible.© Andrew Lansdown
The essay, “Doing the Don’ts”, explores ways of writing tanka (an ancient Japanese poetic form) in English, and argues against the dogma that is stifling the writing of tanka in English. Andrew summarises this dogma as four don’ts: “don’t use titles, don’t use punctuation, don’t use rhyme and don’t use the traditional 31-syllable structure”. A longer version of this essay will be included as an appendix in Andrew’s forthcoming book, Little Studies in Loveliness, a collection of 200+ tanka scheduled for publication by Walleah Press in 2026.
