What Poetry Is Really About

Andrew Lansdown, Allsorts: Poetry Tricks and Treats (Wombat Books, 2011), 278 pages, $24.95 

Andrew Lansdown, many of whose poems have appeared in Quadrant, has here compiled a large collection of his work, mainly shorter poems. It seems primarily intended to introduce children to poetry, but can also be read by adults with pleasure and profit.

“Pleasure and profit” is, in fact, an inadequate phrase. For much of the book is more profound than that: although a lot of the work is very simple, at its best it opens windows onto the transcendent.

Since he began writing in the early 1970s and despite suffering from several disadvantages, including being a West Australian and outside the Sydney and Melbourne poetic cliques, as well as being a professing Christian—indeed a pastor—Andrew Lansdown has acquired an impressive record of poetry publications as well as a number of best-selling children’s novels in the “Dragonfox” series.

While the poems are written in a great variety of styles, a large number are about the natural world—birds are a very frequent subject—and a Japanese influence can be seen in the spare descriptiveness of the writing. Another influence is the poet William Hart-Smith, who Lansdown befriended in his old age when he settled for a time in Perth.

Like Hart-Smith, Lansdown has many poems to be unwrapped like little “packages” of meaning: 

The kestrel is so
Still against the steady wind
It seems to be pinned
To the sky—like a kite held
By an invisible string. 

Lansdown has rejected the destructive injunction—perhaps the worst and most harmful thing ever said about poetry—“A poem should not mean, but be.” His poems certainly are—their images are solid—but they have meaning as well: 

I see on my feet
Black leather and laces brushed
With orange pollen—
The dandelions have made
Enormous bees of my boots. 

The poems add up to an invitation to celebrate the wonder of life, sharply delineating little details—the coloured hood of a parrot, the “second life” of a sea-shell assumed as a home by a hermit crab. A series on caterpillars shows a fascinating mastery of technique applied to one of many improbable subjects. One poem, “A Remembrance of Robins” has many of the characteristics of a villanelle, a form I thought virtually extinct. There are also assonant rhymes in some of the haiku: 

Beside a burnt log
A mob of donkey orchids
Solemnly bray and nod … 

The camera clicks
And to my hand the startled
Red dragonfly flits. 

Andrew Lansdown is a Baptist minister, and, like a Medieval craftsman, has the Greater Glory of God at the back of all his work, although for the most part these poems are not overtly religious in the conventional sense. In this way like The Lord of the Rings, the presence of God is always an awareness but seldom mentioned.

“Christmas Tree” is an example of a devotional poem that is also a descriptive piece on the West Australian tree Nuytsia floribunda. It is typical of Lansdown’s unobtrusive mastery of technique that it takes a couple of readings to see that not only is each verse in a haiku form, but rhymed or half-rhymed as well: 

Rejoice! Even the odd
The unlovely and misshapen
May offer gifts to God. 

Christmas trees are ugly
Trees. Their leaves are tatty and dull
And their limbs are straggly. 

Their wood’s a carpenter’s loss
Being too weak to bear the weight
Of a rafter or a cross 

And yet on Christmas Day
Between banksias and eucalypts
By roads and in paddocks, they 

Blaze with a beauty that hurts
The eye (See them fling the nuggets
Into the sky’s blue skirts!) 

Nuytsia floribunda:
A little tree with gifts of gold
On the Day of Wonder! 

The book concludes with a seventy-page section on poetic form and techniques, a welcome rarity at a time when poetry has been dominated by free verse which has often degenerated into mere pointlessness and meaninglessness. Anyone setting out to learn the essentials of the poet’s technique will find this section most helpful.

The making of this book is particularly valuable at a time when public poetry, under the influence of “educationists” and arts bureaucrats, has been reduced to a variety of clowning (apparently this is now often considered the only way to get children interested). Allsorts shows us, and reminds us, what poetry is really about.

The book is illustrated by the poet’s wife, Susan. Like the poems, the illustrations are often simple but meaningful and effective. 

Hal Colebatch’s latest novel, Counterstrike, was reviewed in the November issue.