Celebration and Beyond

Distillations of Different Lands
by Andrew Lansdown
Sunline Press, 2018, 144 pages, $25
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I met Andrew Lansdown in 1974 when I was trying to teach Creative Writing at Curtin University of Technology and he was the best student in the class by a country mile. It was obvious that he had enrolled in the class not because it was easy but because he genuinely wanted to improve his writing skills. His voice was original and absolutely sincere.

Since then he has published a best-selling series of fantasy books in the US, two collections of short stories and fifteen books of poetry and verse as well as other work. Readers of Quadrant will be familiar with his poetry. He has combined what would be a more-than-respectable body of work for a full-time writer with a career as a Baptist minister and teacher. His religious sensibility as a theologian has given a special depth to his poetry, especially the celebratory poetry, and given it—even the short and humorous…