Getting specific.(Fontanelle)(Book Review)

Fontanelle, by Andrew Lansdown; Five Islands Press, 2005, $18.95.

BACK IN the twentieth century, that distant historic era, when the once much-admired weekly the Bulletin still deigned to employ a poetry editor, a message descended from the heights of the editor-in-chief to the lowly minion who was paid to choose the permitted fourteen-lines-or-less used as a filler between blocks of advertising space. The word was this: no more Andrew Lansdown poems. (That minion, incidentally, was the author of this review.)

It might seem unconscionable that a consistently competent, widely praised and award-winning poet should be banned in such fashion. No other Australian poet kept so consistently to the space restrictions imposed by the Bulletin's management. Yet, all the same, one can see the chief's point. To begin with, publication of a Lansdown poem would guarantee that another Lansdown poem would arrive in the mail the next day.

More significantly, though, it has to be admitted that many of Andrew Lansdown's poems appear at a quick glance to be the same poem. This impression is easily refuted when the poems are read in context, particularly when the context is a collection such as his new book, Fontanelle. The impression of similarity arises from the fact that Lansdown's main strength as a poet can barely be distinguished from his besetting weakness.

His strength lies in the simplicity and clarity of his writing. A typical Lansdown poem depicts a scene in the plainest possible terms, with a minimum of figurative language and no long or unusual words:

 
   That paddock the farmer is ripping 
   will soon bristle with seedlings. 
   Imagine it. Saplings queuing up 
   on the pasture! Then a forest. Yes. 
 
   For many years before the felling, 
   a forest of blue gums or pines. 
   This paradox: a forest arising from 
   a want of timber! In the interim 
 
   see how the man with the tractor, 
   methodical as a child with a crayon, 
   is drawing thick chocolate lines 
   on the green sheet of the paddock. 
 
   Striking, those dark scribbles, 
   parallel and contoured to the hill! 

The effect of this poem is like that of a landscape painting, and one can gaze into it as at a painting to discover depths and details which at first go unnoticed: the world of the child and the commercial realities of adult life are drawn together in a few lines, as deft as brushstrokes.