| LOUIS ARMAND SEANCES Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 1998 ISBN 80-902171-8-4 80 pp., 135 x 200mm softcover $8.50 / £4.99 Available from Abebooks Available at amazon.co.uk Available as Amazon.com According to John Millett, editor of Poetry Australia: "many of the poems in this book rank among the best work written anywhere." Miroslav Holub has described the collection as "glittering" with "surprising images and intensive feelings." While John Kinsella suggests that Armand’s poetry is "both immediate and reflective ... It is confronting work—in subject matter and technique ... I’ve read nothing like it before. It takes risks. And this is exciting and necessary." |
 |
| 'Cranachian Sur-Lyricism,' Mikulas Medek (frontispiece) |
| from SEANCES THE BODILY TABERNACLE the smallgoods girl, by performing a simple operation on his mind, had done away with the membrane separating truth and vision ...--Patrick White she heard wasp & scorpion whet their knives beside her bed entombed in fever mosquito netting feet hands numb swollen clutching at the handles of each apparent object then chisel crack of pain across her eyes a sudden & genocidal sun a body. hers burnt all along its nerve ends ____________________________________ like the ghost of a dead animal she walks from the abattoir château de plaisance along a disused stock route blood leaks from the bottom of her bag- there was the sunday roast she'd wrapped in old newspaper knitting with the dust ... at the gate dead isaac's red cattle-dog paws her leg (re- membrance): that a prison guard at rouen had left her mother a scar deep in her body lifting her skirts fingers prying apart raw meat blood. pigs' blood. under her nails. up her arms she pounds the chopping block with a cleaver ____________________________________ as if to efface one tragedy with another she dreams herself as her mother's ghost (voice cracked, an old recording): i know neither when the clouds broke nor when the plains turned ochreous mud- only that we took the sunken carcasses of sheep in truckloads down behind the sheering sheds ... whenever you go there- the stench of lime-fumes- you can imagine how the wolves must have starved that year all over europe (after nine months her mother's funeral. an abattoir is built on a neighbouring property. covered trucks bring the stench of blood thick with flies & sound of animals sensing death) ____________________________________ watching the cane fires against a northern sky she hears wasp & scorpion whet their knives ... & lays out the cut meat quietly upon the gramophone CENDRILLON a mechanical hand gropes in the desert silent matrimonial (of blood under brittle nails)- too late-already the senseless pantomime, mourning the solemn refusal of (unspoken) words- an ashtray conceals its anonymous accumulation of burnings nightsend ... lipstick traces on a cigarette APROPOS OF READYMADES behind the cathode screen her bachelors their cogs of mechanical limbs loose from desire's irrational calculus- the bride is slowly decapitating herself with her fingernails she's pulling all the wires from the main circuit board she wants to find out if two hundred & forty volts can atone for history: leaving her head floating in the kitchen sink she walks over to the television & sets all the fuses alight ARIADNE'S THREAD after the long night her arms like an astrological map full of endless zeroes ... without knowing why she takes the dulled constellation of her eyes & offers them up to her dealer in kings cross- she says that if she can have one more hit she'll hide it somewhere in her body where the sickness won't find it she says one more hit will give her courage to go blind through the world with a cardboard sign a bowl & a walking cane- but just for good luck she conceals her last needle deep inside her last candle her last square of foil she ties a spoon around her neck on a cotton thread as a last reminder of the way home- though she says on the doorstep: anyway, this time i'm not coming back THE ANNUNCIATION (after Dmitri Schostakowitsch, Trio in Em) i have come nuzzling the ground through the coalshoots of tenements like a sick dog to where a girl made only of bone is wearing lilies in her hair nameless she sleeps beside a gas oven choked with ash the broken cello our bodies make shivers beneath the winter vigil of reliquary walls & slowly hunger grinds on its strings in the morning she carries her love up to the street grey trailing between cold fingers the faceless crowd like an accused as though it will always be waiting at the end of her mind ... guilt is subtly plaiting a noose of hair about her neck eyes mouth full of pity & from a dark corner i am watching her cowled against the longing of my jaws as she begins her descent THE SEANCE (EURYDICE & THE NARCISSUS) no, i discover nothing: mounting this duplicitous calvary the journey is false- the false journey really an illness proceeding only from habit (in the false memory of a heart of which my own is bereft) a solitary grey flower blood ember of an infernal solitude from the once cindered creche of your eyes like a first fire ... ____________________________________ to perceive alive in you the fullness of your death (your secret body & inscrutable face) what will i have left untempted? this silent procession of images returning, now in remembrance of our firstlast love ____________________________________ "ERRANT YES & WITHOUT VOICE" the cunning precipice of your eyes coaxing the ascent ... this darkness (of the verb in whom i decline nothing) deepens where these unjust feet mount the talkative stair of your ear with derisive silence ........................................... ____________________________________ cacophony of her unimagined literal in which you perceive yourself (alone) enacting a death-like a vivisector you open the pregnant subcutaneous regions of flesh ampersand of your body, uncurling (t)here-where the retinal brain cuts knife-edged through conjunctive nervous fluid of distemporal dreams ... & screaming liberty you become ash in the corner of my frenzied eye cracked other voice calling ____________________________________ though now, that your eyes nearest even than your will & mine (or, darkening the trillion instances they desired to elope with the unattainable) return a deeper death in the ear of the silent un-echoed footstep (deafened by merely things believable) from the remembrance to the crossed image daring its vanity its looking back which i or you reciting (never two eyes alike)- echoes: i your self holocaust ____________________________________ nowhere, there as here ruin opens : the eyes suicide detach themselves : ..... INTO THE CINDERS not to be possessed she consigned her flower SEANCES (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 1998) Copyright © Louis Armand, 1998 |