From "useless human pains" to "the body echoes with each barren thudding of the wind, lies in stasis" and "it's the skin that bears trouble in such half-seeking", or the image earlier on in the poem of "that inclement voice, crying poor mouth-bone in its teeth", the message comes through loud and clear.
Life sucks, doesn't it? What a bunch of frames! How clever to see it! And why should a human body, with its pains and needs, be honored, when the mind - with its postmodern convolutions - is so much more interesting. In a poem called 'Utzon', there's this line: "the eroded limits of the body". Eroded by who?
This is not to say Armand can't write a moving line of verse. He most certainly can, in poems such as '& In Arcadia Ego', 'Tidal Patterns', with its more accessible language, and particularly in the poems with references to the work of painters Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan.
In these poems, there's a feeling for texture, light, and color. And a sense of concern about human problems, rather than merely observing humanity from a telescope. Or under a microscope.
The section labeled '7' of a poem titled 'Untitled (Landscape With Emblems)' is positively cinematic in its imagery, with cockatoos "shrieking into view" and the "cracking of dry eucalypt". But perhaps this is merely another game of language, posed for the reader as a stanza on how to distrust vivid imagery. I, for one, enjoyed it. Much preferable to the constant vivisection going on in most every poem.
In Armand's world nature itself is dead, ruined, and not to be trusted. It gives no pleasure. It's as treacherous as T.S. Eliot's urban settings, just as dour, and oppressively moralistic to boot. It's Australia without bare breasts on a beach. What's Australia without a bare bum? Or breasts? What kind of world does he create, without friendship or laughter? Not one I'd want to live in.
A poem that is well done but tricky, lacking in heart, is like a meal that leaves a bad aftertaste. 'Discourse on Method' is a poem that starts off promisingly, inviting the reader in, and then letting the reader down. I'll quote the poem in full.
"the plain too is endless & white it seems
though sometimes yellow
or red, broken at irregular intervals
by the mallee & boreheads - dark eyes
punctuating the monotony & the slow,
insistent drone of "tensile wires" like
something fanatical, absurd"
For "dark eyes" does Armand only refer to the eyes of birds or animals? Or are the eyes that of the narrator? A disturbing ambiguity is set up. The tone is icy and disconnected.
If I was an old-time Marxist, I'd have Armand learn to bake bread. Serve the bread to hungry people. Then teach others to bake bread.
(Reviewed by Sharon Olinka, March 2004)
